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When Customer Dissatisfaction Is a Tech Business Model
jammag writes: A new trend has emerged where tech companies have realized that abusing users pays big. Examples include the highly publicized Comcast harassing service call, Facebook "experiments," Twitter timeline tinkering, rude Korean telecoms — tech is an area where the term "customer service" has an Orwellian slant. Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?
Where are customers supposed to flee to? Many of these companies are de facto monopolies in many areas or at the very least in lock-step with their "competitors." There aren't very many choices for tech companies unless you want to do without, which is unpalatable for many.
Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.
The free market has taken care of it. Good customer service is expensive. Consumers have demonstrated that they are unwilling to pay additional money for good customer service. Successful companies have aborted customer service to keep prices low.
bought-and-paid-for politicians using the law to favor their friends isn't "the free market"
I work for a big corp, and we don't treat our customers like crap.
I think what you're looking at is companies like Comcast who have government guaranteed monopoly in the areas they serve. Smaller outfits or community broadband outfits are either forbidden from competing or are forced to pay exorbitant easement fees. Not by the federal government, but by the local governments. For companies in Comcast's position, there's no need to be concerned how you treat the customer, mainly because the local governments tell them not to worry about it.
I find it funny how people who defend capitalism in this day and age like to say that what we have is "crony capitalism" and if we'd just give real capitalism a try for once it would be super awesome.
What does that sound like?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Perhaps it was habit? Perhaps it was that the gas was 5cents cheaper a gallon?
A nickle a gallon? I'd buy gasoline made from pressed baby kitties and the condensed death agonies of the last endangered whales on earth for a 5 cents a gallon less than the local competitors.
I guess that makes me part of the problem.
And, of course, as other responders have pointed out, the BP pumps were stocked from the exact same local distributor as the Shell pumps across the street, and the Exxon ones up the road, and the "independent" one across town... and quite possibly all from crude from the platform and oil field that went "boom!".
So unless you were willing to completely give up all petroleum products (including textiles and agro-chemical based foodstuffs), or drill your own well in your own back yard and build your own refinery, you aren't going to be able to avoid feeding the machine you hate. Welcome to the 21st Century.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
You don't have to put up with jerks.
For almost every crap business, there's a competitor that isn't crap. Find them.
The natural result of a truly free market is socialism. Members of a vibrant community tend to realize that they do better when their neighbors do, and empathize with them enough to know that a streak of bad luck could make them the pest in their neighborhood, so it's good to take care of those who fall behind.
Capitalism is separate from the free market, and a perversion of it. A wealthy member of a community, before this "genius" invention was made, would've been happy to organize large projects for the public good simply for the prestige of having been in charge of them. Now they require that a portion of workers' labor be diverted to them permanently, returning far more value than they ever contributed. This encourages the venture capitalist to go play in other markets, leaving the community that made him with all the money he's stolen from it, and polluting others that he cares even less about.
While it has made large projects easier to start, those projects have had less and less value to the common people over time. At this point, the labor market is an arrangement whereby you either build something you don't care about for a rich person, or you don't eat. It is functionally indistinguishable from slavery, and it is not meaningfully consensual, given that is harder than ever to be an entrepreneur. We make a big noise about how the internet allows the little guy to make globalism work for him, but in practice what that means is that, in addition to the chokehold multinationals have on every mass market, you're fighting over the scraps of every niche market with literally every other person in the world with a vaguely similar idea.
Capitalism only benefits the people who won the game before everyone else had a complete grasp of the rules. It won't even work for them forever; the harder they play, the less is left for them to win. Capitalism will one day be remembered mainly as the most efficient way to exploit a community to death. Unfortunately, most of us have to rediscover what a functioning community is first, and that's not going to happen before an economic collapse that kills thousands of white people.