The gentleman with the #547 and #523 question ended up on my Do Not Reply list.

Yes, I maintain a list of names, addresses, and email addresses of people who I no longer want to spend time on. I usually add a few comments about why I don’t want to bother with these people. It reminds me who these people are.

For example, I have previous customers who I dropped for never placing an order. After sending someone pricelists for a few years and they never order, I know that they will never order. I don’t carry what they collect? Maybe they think my prices are too high? Whatever the case, I’m not going to keep them on the mailing list. Just this past month someone wrote me, not one, but two letters saying “I saw your ad in XYZ magazine. Please send me your list.” They saw my ad in two separate publications that I advertise in. They are just blindly sending out requests without thinking about seeing their ad somewhere else. This person has been requesting lists since 2004. Their repeated requests go in the trash.

Some customers are very difficult to deal with or sometimes I feel they are being dishonest. I won’t do business with them.

I caught one person who bought a stamp and returned it for a refund. Normally it’s no problem. That is, unless the stamp you send back is not the stamp you bought from me! Yes, they swapped stamps on me. Luckily, this was a stamp that I bought at auction and I was able to get an image of the stamp from the auction house website. I mailed him the image with “Maybe you got the stamps mixed up? But this is the stamp you bought. Please return this one and I’ll gladly refund your money.” I never heard from him again.

There are people on eBay who I’ve bought from, but had problems with their material. It’s hinged. It’s damaged, and so forth. Or people who bought the few things that I occasionally list on eBay and they are problematic to deal with. I block them from bidding.

Every dealer does it whether they admit it or not. Most businesses are like this. There is a small population of people that you come in contact with and for various reasons, you hope to never have contact with them again.