Anyway, at the party, I got into a conversation with a friend who was looking to purchase a Toyota Sienna minivan.  I mentioned that I had just had a pleasant home visit experience with a Mercedes Benz salesperson.  My friend said that he has a customer who is a salesperson at Clair Motors.  It turns out that the salesperson who came over to my house is a customer of my friend.  That is wild and weird stuff.  But wait, there is more.

The host family of the party just bought a Honda  Odyssey LX -- no less, from the local dealer who did not have available for sale any of the Odysseys listed as available for sale via the Autonationdirect.com (see June 6 and June 7 diary entries).  They were very satisfied with the Internet salesperson at this dealership and I have to admit that he has been the only one to date who responded to every one of my emails.  Maybe not wild and weird, but certainly interesting.  They showed me the vehicle and I took it for a spin.  The inside is absolutely spacious and would certainly satisfy well our space needs.  The drive and handling were fine enough.  I did notice some of the design elements that had received negative comments by contributors to the Odyssey vs.Sienna forum at Edmunds.com's Townhall.  The driver seat was not very comfortable for me; it could use more lumbar support and I wish that it could be adjusted to a higher sitting position (the latter not being a very big deal).

A front page story titled "Net store to sell its customer list" and written by Alex Pham appeared in today's Boston Globe (n.b., the link may not work as this article may go into an archive); it talked about the controversy surrounding the sale of Toysmart's customer list information.  I found this article interesting because three weeks ago, I had written about the very issues raised in this article (see June 7 diary entry -- keep scrolling and you will get there) -- though I was never contacted for an opinion about the Toysmart sale -- :-( boo hoo .  One issue that I had raised and was not covered in Pham's story is the potential rise of online consumer advocates.  She and others will eventually become aware of them; you, the Internet Shopping 24/7 Project reader, is already informed, :-) woohoo.

The Pham article begins "OAKLAND, Calif. - In what may become an increasingly common scenario in the brave new world of online commerce, personal information on thousands of Toysmart.com customers has been put up for sale in potential violation of Toysmart's own privacy policy."  I'm not sure whether I can legally list the remainder of the article text, so I won't.