Reflections on American Business

Note:

I wrote this a month ago after a bout of feckless shopping. I returned to this today after another bout of feckless shopping.

Finally, I bought what I needed from Amazon (a company I dislike for various reasons)with no frustration. I got a better deal than I could get in any store.

As I write this, the American business community is experiencing a blue funk. With nothing to buoy the system, the market has dropped like a stone, presaging another drop in economic activity which the wrangling in congress and the incompetence of our financial controllers has done nothing to prevent.

There exists a lack of sincerity in corporate dealings with both their potential customers and the public at large. They seek to create an image of altruism which is so false that no one is fooled by it. The mystery is why they persist in this nonsense.

Many E-mails today carry an admonition not to print a message unnecessarily in order to save paper. On the other hand, I found this tag line at the bottom of a message today:

Notice: It’s OK to print this e-mail. Paper is a biodegradable, renewable, sustainable product made from trees. Growing and harvesting trees provides jobs for millions of men and women, and working forests are good for the environment, providing clean air, clean water, wildlife habitat and carbon storage. When you are through, please remember to recycle it.

I would be more impressed with this paean to the workers in the forestry industry had it not come from a manufacturer of papermaking machinery.

Products, especially electronic ones, have become increasingly complicated to operate for customer satisfaction. On the other hand, a customer's ability to determine if the product fills the bill for his application has increasingly dwindled. One cannot easily get information about a product from its packaging and the trend in retailing is to discourage hands-on inspection. You are limited to reading the few lines - for which there is still room on the virtually unopenable package - dedicated to product description . Most of the packaging is dedicated to warnings in the nature of "Don't eat the packaging, it will cause stomach aches" or "This knife is a sharp instrument and can cause severe injury when used to assault another human being" and similar messages. Repeating these warnings in three or four languages further diminishes room for substantive product information. Even stores with product displays carry only non-working, facade models which frustratingly can't be moved or picked up and is of no more use than the product's picture on the side of the box.

I visited a Walmart where every model of laptop displayed in their iron fetters had most, if not all, of their keys popped off their keyboards. The sales counters were unmanned and the products were locked behind closed gates.

The importance of customer service in the health of any business is a principle that was inculcated in me by my bosses from the moment I joined the business world. Indeed, even today, good customer relations is a cornerstone of our business. I guess it's a universal concept, but among giant businesses with tens of millions of customers, it is honored more in the breach than in fact.

Case in point: Cellular phone providers. Their first response to anything you say to them is to apologize. They can't seriously be sorry for your troubles because they have just made you wait 15 minutes subjected to loud jungle music interspersed with recorded messages telling you of their commitment to your full satisfaction, etc., etc. If you are lucky enough to get in touch with someone who speaks and understands English you are still not assured of having your question answered, especially if it is technical. This hand-holding is what passes for customer service. The truth is, they don't care! And why should they? They have millions of customers with revenues of billions of dollars; does it really matter if they lose a $600.00 a year customer. They will lose him to the competition, true. But the competition experiences the same scenario so no one loses. They expect their system to run flawlessly, which it usually does, and only have customer service to maintain the public's perception that they are concerned.

Woe to us all. The large retailers both brick and mortar as well as online, Walmart, Home Depot, Amazon, and their ilk have destroyed the hands on shopping experience where once a buyer could touch a product, see a real live product in action, ask questions on its use and features before comitting to a purchase. Today, you can return any product when you have determined it doesn't do what you bought it for, but your waste of time and the disadvantage to the guy who buys the product after you have disassembled and repackaged it with likely some parts missing is UnAmerican!