Dear Valued Customer:
We are writing to tell you how much we value your business and to thank you in advance for your continued patronage.
Many of our customers have written to comment on our policy of ending our correspondence with the phrase, "Thank you in advance."
In fact, quite a number of you explained that you did not understand the point of our thanking you for something you had not done yet.
To answer these concerns about our policy of thanking you in advance, we asked our marketing and public relations specialists to answer some of your most "frequently asked questions."
Thank you in advance for carefully considering our corporate rationale for thanking you in advance. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any further concerns.
--The Customer Service Department
Q: Why "thank you in advance?" Isn’t that a little presumptuous?
A: Not at all. The social and commercial history of the use of the phrase "thank you in advance" roughly coincides with the rise in the widespread use of consumer credit in the United States throughout the 1950s and 60s. As consumers became accustomed to charging their purchases on credit, they gradually demanded a more sophisticated level of customer service etiquette. Hence, the traditional "thank you" evolved quite naturally into "thank you in advance." Customers have come to perceive added value in our expressing our gratitude ahead of time.
Q: That sounds like a load of unvarnished bullshit.
A: Thank you in advance for your question.
Q: Has your company secretly mastered some form of time travel? I mean, can your customer service representatives shuttle things like my credit card payments, my dry cleaning, and my iPod battery back and forth in the time-space continuum and cause things to happen in the future? If that’s the case, couldn’t you be running the risk of creating one of those crazy it’s-already happened-in-the-future-loops like in the Terminator movies?
A: While our company has always prided itself on being on the cutting edge of consumer technology, we know of no way to make things happen in the future. That would be a physical impossibility, or so the people in our shipping department tell us.
Q: So how come people in the movies travel back from the future with no clothes on?
A: Simple. Nyrflon hasn’t been invented yet.
Q: When you thank me in advance, it makes me feel as if I have no options. What about free will?
A: Certainly you have free will. If he were alive today, Kant might point out that you can choose between 17 different colors of fleece pullovers in our spring catalogue, for example, in nine different sizes. If everything were set and unchangeable, your entire life would have been determined before you were born. It’d be like singing with the Jackson Five or playing for the New York Mets.
Q: Thanking me in advance sounds just like my neighbor Leon, who works nights as a warehouse foreman, but who everybody suspects is really in the Mafia running a freight-tampering scheme. He gives us boxes of cheap crockery and wineglasses and says "You’ll like this stuff." I feel vaguely intimidated.
A: You got a question somewhere in that?
Q: Are you at all connected, is what I’m asking, in any way with the Cosa Nostra? I mean "thank you in advance" could be interpreted as "how’d you like a limp for life?"
A: What are you, a comedian?
Q: As a teacher, I am constantly telling my sixth grade students that adding extra words to what they write is wasteful of the reader’s time. I tell them that E.B. White’s advice about writing with precision and elegance is wise. Am I wrong?
A: Certainly, notwithstanding.
Q: What?
A: Sometimes gratuitous verbiage makes you feel better, right? "Gesundheit," for example. Or "Have a nice day." Or "You get two sides with that." Or "Shit happens."
Q: So then, are you just pushy-- or what? "Thank you in advance" sounds like you’re trying to twist my arm. Use undue influence. Light a fire under me. Kill me with kindness. Why for God’s sake can’t you just say "Thank you"?
A: Don’t make us come over there.
© 2007 by D. R. Belz