You know they have to exist, the people who respond to “spam” e-mail offers, but you can’t imagine who they are. For Orlando Soto, No Day Is Complete Without Some Spam profiles one such spam-fan:
Mr. Soto used to haunt rummage sales, thrift shops and flea markets, but he hurt his back in the mid-1990s, so he turned to the Internet. He became an eBay devotee, staying up late to bid on software, self-help business tapes and other items. Soon he began buying via spam as well. “I was never anti,” he said. “It’s like a chase, a treasure hunt.”Eventually, spam prompted Mr. Soto to dabble in Internet entrepreneurship himself. He’s bought fancy knives, leather jackets, stuffed animals, party supplies and software, all via spam, and then created Web sites to sell the items at a profit — a skill he learned from another piece of spam. Mr. Soto says he also has bought some adult DVDs and videos via spam, but never got around to marketing them. He says he purchased two pornography Web sites, again via spam, and ran them for a while, but then he decided they weren’t worth the trouble and disabled them. Likewise, he says he procured some provocative domain names via spam. In the past, Mr. Soto says he has sent out spam himself, but he doesn’t any more for fear of the increasing multitude of federal and state spam regulations now on the books.
Mr. Soto says he has made very little money on these spam-inspired business ventures. “I wish I did,” he says, adding that he doesn’t have time to design all the Web sites required to resell stuff. “I buy it and then three weeks later it sits there,” he concedes. “I do a lot of impulse buys.”
But it’s the bargains that keep him devouring spam, including a $150 metal detector he recently bought. Good spam, he says, leaves him feeling blessed and telling himself, “I can’t believe this really came.”