A while back my girlfriend and I began thinking that it would be nice to have a car. Living in Hoboken, N.J., with its proximity to Manhattan and its abundance of efficient public transportation, a car is definitely not a necessity but it would undoubtedly make getting out of town easier.
Finding a suitable car that was reasonably priced turned out to be more of a hassle than I ever imagined and I began to have pangs of anxiety when I would see the exhausted and defeated faces of people who had been circling around town for hours trying to find a parking spot (our mile square town is a notoriously difficult place to park).
There was also the joy of bargaining with used-car dealers. At one such establishment we were hurriedly rushed to the back lot as soon as we entered. The salesman grabbed us literally by the arm and took us back. He moved directly to a 2009 Infiniti he was overly fond of and began his spiel. After his rather sloppy sales pitch, he got to the seat warmers, as if that was important to me.
The seat warmers were just one example of many gadgets and superfluous features I could not care less about. Weeks later, sitting at a Prudential press briefing in Manhattan that had drawn leading benefits experts from around the country, I could not help but see the similarities between the extra gadgets on the car and voluntary benefits.
That sentiment was coming from me as a skeptical consumer and, for the most part, it is the mindset many people have when annual benefits enrollment season comes around. However, voluntary benefits are not seat warmers. They she be looked at more as seat belts.
Insurers have done a magnificent job of giving companies the tools they need to educate their employees about the importance of voluntary benefits but the employee has to be keen on voluntary benefits in the first place. Checking out cars on the lot, so to speak and for the most part they are not.
