This is Felicia Day. She’s not involved in this story but she deserves more attention in this day and age
The last couple of times Netflix decided to raise its prices, I was a vocal advocate against it and a denouncer of all things Netflix. The first time, Netflix decided to cut a line between its new streaming services and its CDs by mail programs, effectively charging you twice as much if you wanted to keep both, which originally were the same service. I quit Netflix then.
Then Netflix started to get better again, and its CEO stopped being an asshole to his customers. Yeah, an asshole. He treated his customers as cattle and sheep, and that’s why I quit that first time. Somewhere down the line, someone told him to shut his stupid face, and he started to act like his customers actually were people. So I was good. There is also great news on how much does Kyle Richards make per episode.
And then Netflix decided to raise prices again, and it did it in a way that eased the increases into being. I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t feel like I was being treated like livestock, so I generally went along with it.
Now, Netflix has decided it is going to raise its prices again. For me, it’s about a dollar more, and adding in taxes and the weird math that these companies do, it will probably end up being closer to $1.50 to $2.00 more. Yeah, that never makes me happy, but we live in a corporate economy that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about people, so I’ve come to accept it.
Netflix is struggling against a bunch of different companies that are trying really hard to muscle in on the streaming giant. However, I don’t really see the other companies as young upstarts or forces of good trying to bring quality and good prices to my door. Many of these are owned by huge corporate enterprises that are known for foot in the door strategies where they beat out the competition and then raise the prices once they’ve secured a beach head as the only game left in town.
Netflix has been a solid service for me. It pulses higher and lower sometimes based on its content, but it’s generally upfront about what it’s doing. I dumped Hulu last year after it kept losing one show after another and then tried to play it off as “we’re solidifying our offerings,” whatever that means. Amazon is cool, but I see it as an extra benefit to Prime membership because it doesn’t really offer a whole lot of content, and the majority of its content is stuff I would never watch anyway. I tried DirectTV Now, and let’s just say that I’m now in the “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, and I’m a stupid moron that doesn’t deserve to continue making choices for himself” mode. My only other real choices are buying television shows directly from iTunes (which is massively expensive), cable (which I have but rarely offers me a selection of things to watch at a moment unless I was lucky enough to remember to dvr a specific show at a specific time), or staring longingly at my blank television screen (which after 1999 should no longer have been one’s only option).
So, I’m okay with Netflix having to charge a little extra. It’s still affordable to me, but if it rises another time after this, I’ll probably dump it and treat all streaming services as a failed experiment that couldn’t live up to its promises in the wake of the realization that media companies are really only into profiting rather than providing services.
Here’s a confession. I read the newspaper every day. And some days are more informative than others. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the news over the last couple of months has been really crappy, almost to the point of where I sometimes suspect that today’s newspaper might have been recycled from a few weeks ago and sold to me as brand new. I’ve been feeling this a lot lately. It’s like there’s no interesting news any more, and that worries me because I’m a newshound, constantly in need of news gratification. So, here’s a quick rehash of what I’ve found to be the “significant” news stories for the immediate past (and present).
1. Justin Beiber did something. Don’t know what it was, but for some reason when he does something, the news wants to tell me about it. I get it. Teen girls like him, mainly because teen girls haven’t matured to a point where their brains actually generate understandable logic. So this “heart throb” did something that may or may not have been controversial, and as a result the media is in a frenzy making sure that we know all about it. I don’t care. Please stop telling me about it. It’s taking up space where I could be reading about…well, honestly, I don’t have anything else I’m following, which is a part of this whole post in the first place. As a corollary, please don’t tell me about Selena Gomez either. The only reason I know who she is is because she’s often mentioned in the same sentence as Justin Bieber, which makes her even less significant than someone I find of absolutely no significance.
2. Congress voted to not vote on anything. That’s about the length of the summary of the latest stories involving Congress. They’ve spent the last two years arguing over how they don’t agree with each other, with the president, with the people, and with the color of the sky. I get it. They don’t get along, and they believe that they need to get rid of the people they don’t get along with in order to get anything done. As a result, they’re going to have to justify their ridiculous salaries and excellent health benefits ( that are not upto the standards found in Forest Hills urgent care clinic and also they are the not the same as anyone they vote to approve health benefits for, such as the poor, the military or, well, anyone else), so they need to pretend to be doing something. And because the media can’t just report: TODAY, CONGRESS PROVED IT’S USELESS AND DID NOTHING, they report all of the horse race crap, and we end up with stories that tell us absolutely nothing.
3. School shootings are on the increase. I’m not happy about this, and at the same time I kind of want to stop hearing about it because statistically, they’re not actually increasing. We’re just hearing more about them because they fit the “if it’s on fire, then it’s a story” paradigm of national news outlets. Most people don’t realize that kids have been stupid for about as long as kids have been around. What is different is that the media is in such a need of stories to fill a 24 hour news cycle that whenever someone shoots someone, pulls out a gun, draws a picture of a gun, bullies someone, thinks about bullying someone, says mean things, or whatever, we’re going to hear a national story about it. And then commentators are going to get on the news and talk about the “tragedy” and how it never used to be that way “back in my day”. Yes, it was. It just didn’t happen in your particular school at the time you’re remembering back on. But it happened in the school down the street, which means that “back in your day” these things were happening but because they didn’t happen in YOUR school, you weren’t paying attention, and because most people didn’t pay attention to news back then (as most of it was from the 3 networks and boring as hell), there’s a belief that it was much different back then. Statistically, the only thing that really changed was we have more access to national information than we had before, which means that something that happens in Colorado when you live in New York gets put in front of your TV screen, making you feel that it’s happening in your neighborhood, when it’s thousands of miles away from where you live.
4. The most important story in the country is gay marriage. Well, you’d get that impression from the amount of rhetoric focused on it. Yes, I agree that it should be an important story, but it’s not really, and it affects so few people in comparison to the grand total of people who think they’re affected. Disclaimer: I’m not gay, which means that the issues involved in this continuously involving “issue” doesn’t actually affect me. Reality: That’s not completely true. It does affect me, but not in the way that seems to be the focus of so much attention. Let me explain.
You see, there are people in the world who are not heterosexual. I’m not one of them, yet because I’m heterosexual, if I was a total dweeb and rude person, I could say that how someone lives his or her own life somehow has an impact on my life. Reality: It doesn’t. If two men want to marry each other, and they live next door to me, the total effect after doing all of the mathematics is…um, zero. What does affect me is how much noise they make playing their stereo, or in what seems to be my personal experience, how much of a complaint they have about the fact that I sometimes play mine too loud. You might notice that how loud their stereo is has absolutely NO connection to whether or not they happen to be gay or straight. So, their impact AS A RESULT OF THEM BEING GAY, is none.
Then the argument comes in about how gay marriage somehow diminishes the status of marriage in general. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I believe that divorce has a much larger impact on the status of marriage. I feel that if NO ONE ever got divorced, then marriage would be sanctified and never in fear of danger. Not only that, I think that if spouses NEVER cheated on each other, then marriage would be strengthened that much better. So, from now on, I think that anytime someone talks about a divorce, that person should be shunned, thrown out of the country and declared a heathen of all good thinking Americans. Come to think of it, if people didn’t get married in the first place, then perhaps the fear of divorce would never happen, which would strengthen the very value of partnership. Or perhaps partnership is the problem, and that it’s kind of unnatural, as God originally intended for every person to be alone, which is why He didn’t create people as partners but designed each person to be capable of functioning without another person. I’m sure there’s a verse somewhere in one of the many different interpretations of religious texts out there that says exactly that, although it might say it in different words that need to be translated by some priest who has spent too much time reading the book and pretty much nothing else.
The point: How does the way someone else lives affect me when it doesn’t have an effect on me? I can have all sorts of bad feelings about how someone else lives, but I guarantee that someone else is probably having bad feelings about the way I live for some random reason, no matter how wonderful I live my life in the constant vigilance to the ideals put forward by the Shania (if my religion happens to be the worship of all things Shania Twain). Unfortunately, no matter what you do, someone else is going to disagree with how you live your life and think that he or she knows better than you do, and then for bizarre reasons DEMAND you live another way. I like the old George Carlin belief system that people need to just leave people alone (to paraphrase several great speeches he’s given over the years).
5. Which brings me to the story lines of national politics. As I read stories on national news, I find absolutely nothing in the way of interest for any story because none of them make a single difference to me whatsoever. The stories that do are glossed over and treated as afterthoughts, meaning no one seems to care about things we should care about. So, what kinds of subjects should we hear about. Well, I have a few:
A. Health care. I’m not talking about Obamacare or how badly the health care exchanges were implemented. Although I will say that those stories COULD have started off a conversation about things that NEED to be discussed, but never will. What needs to be discussed then? Cost. Health insurance is expensive, and it shouldn’t be. Because our government has taken a hands off approach for so long, we have the worst health care system in the world, aside from dictatorships that use firing squads as a health care remedy. For the first and second world, our health care is abysmal because we allowed the whole system to evolve from a really bad premise to begin with. Government has been playing catch up with our system since day one, and that means that any solutions aren’t going to happen from half measures; the whole system needs a restart and the old money profiteers need to be put out of the system so that we can put together something that shows we are, in fact, the one first world nation in all ways. What does that mean? Everyone gets health care covering pretty much everything they need. We start to create a system that is proactive rather than reactive, meaning that you don’t seek health care for the first time AFTER you’re already starting to get sick. One of our largest problems in this country is diabetes, which if you understand the disease, all of our efforts to combat it are to alleviate the symptoms, and that’s it. We do the same thing for cancer. Instead of massive money being spent on “curing” cancer, most of our procedures are designed around helping people “live with cancer” instead. I don’t advocate stopping the reactive measures, but I’d really like to see us work on the proactive measures. This would mean a completely change to our health care mentality, and that’s never going to happen as long as these decisions are being made by people who are so indoctrinated by this payment system plan, because they are completely incapable of seeing any other alternative. And a personal belief of mine is that pharmaceutical companies might be a huge part of the problem as well, although there’s lots of room for debate in that one. An example: I was dealing with some depression issues a few years back and went to a therapist, who I immediately discontinued seeing because her “solution” to practically everything was medication. I didn’t need medication to stop being depressed. I needed to feel better about my situation by finding solutions to my situation. Medication was a stupid solution, but this therapist saw no other alternative. A friend of mine was diagnosed with “stress” and prescribed lots of medication. She started on it for a few months before she dumped it and took an alternative route NOT condoned by her prescriber. Her “new” route consisted of paying for massages, and she’s doing a lot better these days. The interesting side bar to that is that her health coverage didn’t cover massage therapy but did cover medication. Again, the eye is on the wrong ball, and as long as we’re a part of this system, it’s never going to change. Additionally, for those struggling with severe issues and looking for alternative approaches, seeking help from a private rehab centre might be a viable option to consider.
B. Elections and Representation. Every election you hear people start complaining about how so few people participate int eh voting process. There’s a reason for that. It’s not because they’re apathetic, happy with the system as is, or lazy. Many people don’t participate because they don’t feel they have a voice, no matter how hard political parties try to convince them otherwise. This was seen during the whole Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. In case you weren’t completely following what was happening, people were dissatisfied with government and their lack of influence on it, so they tried mobilizing outside of the power structure that already exists. What they discovered was that the entrenched power system gave them no voice, and when they made a stink about it, the powers that be ridiculed the protesters and treated them as crazy people. Occupy Wall Street was defeated early in its infancy as the media treated it as a joke, constantly ridiculing its members by pointing out that they had no better ideas, were disorganized and weren’t making any headway in their protests. Having watched the back and forth, I came away with a different perspective, albeit a more economic one. The media responded as the powerful business interests they were, seeing Occupy Wall Street as a financial threat, which caused the media to treat them as outliers and a humorous joke. Wall Street itself, responded in kind, as they were the financial target of these people who were upset with how there has been little oversight over economic impact issues from this part of the political system, and because of such a response, there never will be.
The Tea Party has been an even more interesting animal, mainly because this was a protest from an actual economic power base that couldn’t be ignored in the same way. Remember, Occupy Wall Street was coming from the poor, disenfranchised side of the political spectrum, much easier to knock its wind out right from the beginning. But the Tea Party was a disorganized response to dissatisfaction from the political right, which is inhabited by those with financial clout, meaning the people Occupy Wall Street were actually protesting against. As they were now organized against OWS, they came about immediately after with a power base that demanded the Republican Party (its main level of constituency) to respond. As a result, they’ve entrenched themselves as a part of that party. What we’re starting to discover is that they only represent an elite economic power base, which has its own representation mainly because it can afford to make its message known through financial clout during elections. We’re starting to see this with their attacks on Obamacare, and specifically the members of the Senate who supported it. We’re going to see a lot more of this in the months to come.
But what it means is that the average person has less and less touching of the strings of government. And this means that as we move closer to the next election, people have come away from these previous two movements convinced that nothing is going to change because when they did try to become organized, nothing happened, unless they were already rich and powerful. To participate in that environment is a lesson in futility, and nothing that either political party says is going to change that. The Republicans don’t have any intentions of representing the disenfranchised, having sold their souls to the very franchised economic elite, and the Democratic Party is counting on these disenfranchised souls to somehow embolden them with the ability to maintain power in a system that still rewards the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. Basically, the Democrats have to convince people who bought into “hope and change” that more years of their control will somehow bring about “hope and change” when the originator of that message did very little for them other than try and fail. The alternative is to opt out of participation, and sadly enough the expectation is that rhetoric can somehow make this different. Good luck on that.
C. The economic future. This is really what should be the main focus right now. There is no lack of books on the concept of low-hanging fruit that has disappeared from the process, meaning that all of our advantages we used to have available (like continued open spaces for colonizing land, economic opportunities for business growth, and access to untapped natural resources) are practically gone. We no longer produce new things but seem to have fallen into a rut of continuous reinvention of old things, like the consumer electronics show that instead of showing us new technologies on the horizon continues to show us new variations of television sets that keep reinventing the old technology. When every house in America that needs a television has pretty much already bought one, we’re forcing a false need on people that they’re no longer responding to with checkbooks. The last few major advancements in technology that drove need have been around for some time (televisions, microwave ovens, computers and cellphones), meaning that we’re not producing anything that’s changing the paradigm to move us towards new need. Sure, you can argue the iPad was a new invention of this nature, but it just gathered a number of different products and combined them into one, which, if you think about it, actually is a step back on the production of new things list. As long as our future consists of combinations and reinventions of old things, we don’t have a lot of progress to take advantage of, which would explain why industry innovation has focused a lot more on consolidation than progress, meaning the idea of expansion by robotizing a labor force and outsourcing to countries where its cheaper to produce something.
Anyway, this has gotten much longer than I originally intended to write, so I’ll stop there for now. I would hope, by now, the basic idea has been relayed.
Just recently, I was working for a health care organization that seemed to be having some difficulty in customer service. As a result, the higher-ups thought it would be really beneficial if the education department (of which I was a part) took up the task of teaching customer service to the front line employees, specifically the people who engage patients when they come to the hospital system. So, after a few meetings that consisted of management explaining how customer service needs to improve (in which I was reminded of the infamous pro dominant adage of “We will beat our slaves until moral improves” but I digress), we were then shown a motivational film that’s been making the circuit called “Give Them the Pickle.” In case you’re not familiar with this film, it features the creator of the ice cream parlor Farrell’s as he explains how a customer got really upset in one of his establishments because he asked for an extra pickle and was then told that pickles are extra, or something like that. This started a whole series of adventures where this owner decided to change the customer service model of his franchise forever. There may have been an “and they lived happily ever after” at the end of it as well. I’ll admit, it was motivational and it was a good presentation. But it seemed to miss a few things, specifically when dealing with the company where I just worked.
First, the problem inherent in our company has a lot more to do with service than just customer service. To begin with, customer service tends to be lacking WITHIN the organization, so that quite often it can be a bit difficult to deal with other parts of the company because of the silos that have been created and maintained. When you have that sort of atmosphere going on, telling those same employees that they now need to focus on customer service when they’re having enough trouble providing company service to each other, well, there’s a dysfunction already harming the larger issue.
One day last year, I was on the bus near the main hospital when I overheard a conversation between a bunch of the passengers. One said something about our hospital, as in he’s never been there and people always told him to avoid it. And then people chimed in about how the people that worked there were rude, the services were all overpriced, and not a single one of them failed to mention our competition as the better facility to go in case you ever need health care needs fulfilled. I brought this conversation back to my organization when I first heard it, and the immediate response I received from management was a reinterpretation of the message, that they were complaining because they couldn’t afford the good health care that was provided by our establishment, not that it was overpriced; when it came to the customer service part, they just continued talking about how because they were already miffed at the prices, they would interpret anything else as negative. Basically, they had solid information from people who were complaining, and the response was that obviously they were confused about what they were complaining about, so nothing needs to be changed.
This is the organization that now needs to “improve” customer service by teaching employees how to give free pickles as ice cream parlors. Keep in mind that we don’t give out free health care, free testing supplies (or tests), cut rates on surgery, an actual better product than any other health care facility (even though the argument keeps being made that they do, based on a sample size of none, as statistics don’t really make a lot of sense when you’re comparing to yourself (one divided by one still does manage to equal one).
So, how do you improve customer service when you actually don’t pay any attention to the public to whom you are now supposed to be providing better customer service? The simple answer is you don’t. The solution isn’t really a riddle, but an acknowledgement that perhaps we need to go out into the population and talk to them, find out what they would like from a large hospital system that claims to know what they need without actually asking them, and perhaps worrying less about pickles and more about why people might be there in the first place. I was in the hospital last year with a kidney problem, and I was scared during the time I was in there. One of the worst doctors I’ve ever experienced was one who was actually from the place where I worked. She didn’t care one iota about how her patients felt, and she was kind of a moron as well (which as a communications person, I attributed to the fact that she had zero listening skills, which made her diagnosis work absurdly bad).
Which brings me back to the whole communication aspect of this whole situation, which you probably should have guessed it would come in at some point or another. If you want to figure out what’s wrong with your customer service, talk to your customers and try to find out. It’s a good thing to look at comment cards and all that, but quite often a comment card is one of those things logged AFTER a bad experience, which means you don’t really have the opportunity to fix what was wrong, and like the place where I worked, they probably never will.
Some of these things should go without being said, but unfortunately I think that’s the problem. They haven’t been said, and thus, people are now convinced they have the answers after having watched some old entrepreneur talk about giving pickles to customers when they ask for them.
Some moron running for senate in Georgia thinks he has a great idea to, well, I don’t really know what it would solve, but like usual, a House Representative in Georgia, who wants to rise in power, thinks it’s a really good idea to put school children to work to earn their “free lunches.” Basically, U.S.Representative Jack Kingston thinks it would be really nifty for the poor to put them to work sweeping up cafeterias for their lunch money, because somehow this would instill in them the idea that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you think about it, he’s advocating a legal fix to an old adage that doesn’t actually have a lot of connection to anyone’s reality.
The obvious counter to this whole situation is this belief that somehow this is going to make poor kids feel like they’ve “earned” their lunch. No kid pays for his or her own lunch at that age, or at least very few do, because no kids have their own money at that age. Their parents give them money, so they aren’t learning money management skills. They’re learning that their parents have money, or they’re learning that their parents have no money. That’s really the lesson that gets taught here no matter how some Republican Neanderthal wants to spin it.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. Well, it’s not really a secret, but I grew up dirt poor. My mom was uneducated and my dad split when I was too young to ever know him. So my mom worked crap jobs and was basically too uneducated (and proud) to take government handouts. She probably should have. It didn’t help that she was sick and then went blind in one eye. She tried and that’s really all that’s important.
So, at one point I was put on discount lunches. Somehow, even though our apartment was overrun with cockroaches on a daily basis and our neighbors were crack addicts and prostitutes, we were too well off to get full free lunches. So, my mom had to pay a certain amount of money and then got discounted lunches for me when I went to school.
Let me tell you about those discounts. They gave you a special paper card that you had to present each and every time you presented for lunch, and the system was so obviously designed to point out that you were using this card, which meant that every other kid looked at you when you were presenting it, and I can’t tell you how bad kids are at making someone feel like shit in some weird process of making themselves feel better about themselves. It was humiliating every time I had to present that card and then pay my token of the discount I was allowed to pay. There were many times when I skipped lunch because it was easier to not eat than to have to go through that process each and every time at lunch.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Representative Kingston never had to go through that experience when he was growing up. And I’ll bet that not once has one of his children ever had to go through such a thing just to get a stupid lunch meal. That sort of thing scars you for a long time, and even in my middle age these days, I have never forgot how it felt to have to present that stupid card when I was at that age.
And that’s the problem with a lot of our representatives who think they actually represent people they serve. Edmund Burke argued a long time ago that he could “represent” miners in his district even though he’s never been a miner because he knows what’s best for them. He was wrong then, and Kingston is wrong today. I’m sure there’s a special place in Goddess Hell where Kingston has to ask for a school lunch each and every day and is told that no, he must starve because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Years ago, I used to work for a hotel that loved good publicity. It would volunteer for neighborhood “giving” things, and then recruits its employees to provide the ground work for what needed to happen. And then it would release a big press release about how much that hotel was doing for the community.
One of the employee “perks” of working for that large hotel chain was that on every Thanksgiving the hotel would give a turkey to each employee before that holiday. It was a nice thing, and if you had a family, or could cook a turkey, it was probably a great benefit. I worked for that company for seven years, and five years in I realized that each year they gave away a turkey, I never took one because I basically had no family and no way to actually cook it. So, it would have been a waste of food. But on that fifth year, I had a new idea. I was going to give my turkey to a food shelter so other people could benefit from the free item I was given.
As I told other people about this, I started to discover how many people didn’t have families of their own, and how many of them turned down the turkey each year on Thanksgiving because they had nothing to do with it. So, they started asking me if they could give their turkeys to me and then have me donate them to the food shelter I was going to give mine to. In a few short days, I had the promise of 25 turkeys from random people at work who told other people who then contacted me. When the givaway occurred, I realized I had a bit of a problem because I really had no ability to carry 25 turkeys home with me, or any place to store them for several days before I would be able to deliver them. So, I contacted one of the main kitchen executives, and he gave me access to a freezer for the time being so I could store this bounty.
Then I got onto the phone and started calling food banks, before realizing that unless you’re a “donor” they know, they’re sometimes not all that interested in someone giving them free food. Finally, I found a San Francisco food kitchen that was in desperate need of this sort of thing, and I arranged to deliver it to them.
The day I pulled up my station wagon to the loading dock to load all of these turkeys, I was met in the loading dock by a minion from the human resources department., She wanted to know what I was doing with all of these turkeys. After I explained it to her, she indicated that these turkeys were for employees, and that I had no permission from the hotel to be doing what I was doing. I explained that these turkeys were given to me by employees who wanted them to go to some place where they would be of use. She was adamant that this had to be approved by higher ups. The guys in the loading dock ignored her and loaded up my car with the turkeys and then allowed me to leave. When I returned to work on Monday morning, I was subsequently written up by someone in human resources for subordination, which ended up being dissolved after a union rep was brought in to dispute the charge.
The next year, no less than 40 people approached me about donating turkeys, even though I didn’t even say I was going to do it that year. As I started coordinating the activity, another person from human resources had me called into her office where she explained to me that if it wasn’t a hotel function, designed by hotel HR, then it was not my option to do. I explained that these turkeys were given to employees, which meant they could do anything they waned with them. She explained that if the hotel wasn’t getting credit for its charity, then I was to cease this activity immediately. I said no, as this wasn’t really her choice to make. We never came to an agreement.
I stopped working there the next year and went back to school, but let’s just say that it taught me an important lesson when it comes to HR and corporations. I’ll let you figure out what that lesson was.
Fast forward to now, and I now work for a hospital system that loves its publicity (sound familiar). It constantly reveals how loved it is in the community to which it serves, and it often calls on its employees to make it appear even better. An example I find eye-opening is its yearly United Way campaign. Every year, expensively produced materials are given to every employee to assist them in making the maximum contribution they can. What I find interesting is that one of the very attractive women I work with who NEVER speaks to me on a daily basis, actually starts speaking to me right before she approaches me to “give” to the United Way campaign because she is the department’s spokesperson and her success in getting signatures is part of how she is perceived to management.
Now, I have personal problems with the United Way that are irrelevant to the discussion, but let’s just say that due to my experiences with them, I do not contribute to them. I do contribute to other places. Just not them. But the place where I work feels it is important for maximum contributions and consistently overplays how important it is that each employee contribute. One such appeal came the other day from a corporate VP who felt that employees weren’t giving enough, so he was opening up the time to give for longer than originally planned. All I kept thinking was “you know, this guy makes so much money that he could probably make up the need that he wants all by himself, but I bet he’s not interested because he’s only giving a certain amount that will be represented by a certain percentage of what he can claim on his taxes this year.” Or something like that.
When this whole campaign is over, the place where I work will claim victory and won’t actually say “Our employees were so great because they gave this much money to the United Way.” Instead, the expensively printed materials will indicate that the place where I work reached its goals and provided a certain amount of money to the United Way. Again, it may just be semantics, but those semantics are why I tend to avoid corporate giving in most instances. It’s almost always about the corporation, not about the people who work for that organization. Sure, they’ll have a nice little memo that goes out to the employees, but when it comes to the real recognition, they’ll take full credit and bask in the glory.
That’s why I say it’s not really charity if you want credit for your giving. When I gave away those turkeys, the recipient who off loaded them wanted to know who she should give credit, even trying to figure out who to make out receipt, and I just stared at her dumbfounded, revealing that I did it because people were hungry and I had extra food. What more needed to be said than that?
I was dropping off a friend of mine at a car repair place on the other side of town last night when I decided to pick up some McDonald’s chicken mcnuggets on the way home. I’d never stopped at any place in this neighborhood before, but this was one of those ethnically diverse areas where most of the signs were in Spanish, bordering on an African-American-based population area. This was the kind of area where a lot of economically struggling families live, although not so bad a neighborhood as to constitute a fear for anyone visiting the neighborhood.
I’m a creature of habit. I tend to buy the same thing constantly, so the meal I always get costs me $6.46 at the McDonald’s I normally frequent. This time, however, the charge came to $6.66. For some reason, a few miles from the other McDonald’s, my cost was twenty cents more than what it normally cost me. I paid it, but it left me thinking, why is the charge more here than in the nicer area where I normally get my food?
It’s not like the people in this area can afford more. Economically, they are less well off than the people who frequent the McDonald’s in my neighborhood. Yet, because they are figuratively in a completely different universe than the other McDonald’s, the pricing is completely different.
I remember when I lived in San Francisco, and I worked at the Hilton downtown. The people at the Hilton liked to say they were in the “financial district”. In reality, they were in the Tenderloin, one of the lowest of the economic areas in San Francisco.
Across the street from the hotel, I used to grab a carton of milk every day. It was one of those habit things where I never thought much about it. However, one day, I was a paying more attention than usual, and I noticed that the Arabic clerk always looked at a sheet of tax prices that was centered under a glass sheet on the main counter. My milk cost 99 cents, but the clerk looked on his list and then told me my price for the milk (with tax) was now $1.35. Right then and there, I thought, wait, nowhere in the country is the local sales tax 36 percent. NOWHERE. So, I inquired about this. The clerk said, “tax.” I informed him that 36 percent is outrageous.
His response wasn’t “Wow, you’re right” and then charged me the correct amount. Instead, he took the milk out of the bag and proceeded to kick me out of his store. When I protested, I actually saw his hand moving towards a spot under the counter, where I noticed there was a revolver. Taking my losses, I left the store.
What this taught me is that there’s an outright intent to screw people over whenever you can. In the Tenderloin district, I suspect that store owners figure the people are too stupid to realize they’re being cheated, and they’re dimed and quartered (as opposed to being nickle and dimed) endlessly.
So, what are your thoughts? Is this capitalism at its norm? Is this corruption? Or do people just generally not care because it’s happening to the poor, and they’re supposed to be victims any way?
Today, Zynga’s stock kind of went into a tailspin downwards. Zynga, in case you’re not aware, is famous for building software that used to consist of games you could play specifically on Facebook. Then they went public, making lots of money and continued to try to make games (sometimes in Facebook and sometimes outside of it). At the time of their IPO, all I could think to myself was “this is a company that doesn’t really make anything that’s profitable.” Their profit comes from trying to get people to pay for virtual goods IN A FREE ONLINE GAME. While pay for play works in some venues, like MMO’s like City of Heroes and Lord of the Rings Online, people didn’t go to Zynga because they were interested in playing a specific game. Zynga, on the other hand, tries to interest people in their site and THEN trying to get them to play some of their games. And then if that works, they try to get them to pay money for the game they’re already getting for free.
Does anyone see a problem here?
Well, their stock is continuing to go down, mainly because their “hits” are very old, and they’ve never really done anything to convince potential customers that they have something just as good. Farmville was their famous property, and even though I played it at the time, I never invested a dime in the game, and after I grew bored with it, I stopped playing it and anything else Zynga had to offer.
Facebook, however, has been interlinked with Zynga since the beginning. Facebook gets a bit of profit from anything that Zynga makes from its transactions.
Which means I should probably talk about Facebook, too. This is another online company that has absolutely no value whatseover. Basically, it’s value is to get people to sign on and then tell other people who are signed on what they’re doing. Facebook offers nothing other than being the park bench where people are sitting.
When Facebook went public, it was already feared that there was no real revenue stream available from the company. All it really did was advertise, and it doesn’t do it very well. In its early days, I paid for an ad to sell one of my books on their site, and the results were horribly bad. I never paid for the service again. Instead, I got much better returns from places like Goodreads.com. Facebook, as people have started to realize, has a customer base that shows up, looks at traffic and then goes away. Some stay online forever, but they NEVER press any of the buttons that take them to the ads. In other words, Facebook has absolutely no revenue stream whatsoever when it comes to advertisements. The only way they could make money is to charge people for using the service, but once they did that, their service would become a graveyard.
This is the problem with companies that sell imaginary goods. Some, like Lord of the Rings Online, which actually offers something tangible (a lot of fun and a strong customer base that has remained with them for years, first as paying customers), Facebook and Zynga offer nothing really tangible. Zynga doesn’t even offer very good games. They’re casual games, which means that they’re meant to be played as you’re doing something else. Think of their games as almost an afterthought. Whereas, Lord of the Rings Online is a game meant to be played with your full attention.
Facebook, as well, offers nothing but a place for people to report their happenings. If you’re not a celebrity, chances are pretty good that not a lot of people (aside from really close friends and maybe family) really care. Even Google Plus, which does appeal mainly to following celebrities, isn’t all that popular, no matter how much Google wishes that weren’t so.
Facebook has a few days until its reckoning emerges. You see, they have to reveal to stockholders just how well they’re doing. I suspect they’re not doing well. With Zynga’s loss reported today, it’s only a matter of time before we hear that Facebook isn’t doing any better. And then their stock is going to go down really fast.
It’s unfortunate, but then we’re dealing with companies that have no actual value, other than perceived value and fantasies of being more than they really are. I like to think that their value is comparable to my ability to date Jessica Alba. Sure, it’s very possible it might happen, but she’s really an imaginary good (a really, really GOOD good), but the reality of my dating her is pretty dismal. That’s how I see Facebook and Zynga. Slowly, I’m noticing more and more people are starting to feel the same way.
I received an email from Bed, Bath & Beyond this morning, announcing “Online Clearance: These deals won’t last forever.” Before that, I received one from Best Buy, indicating that I had only two days to come in and take advantage of their “special” sale on electronics. Newegg thinks that if I don’t respond by today that I’m going to miss out on great savings. Amazon sends me a message practically every day that tries to convince me, like Barnes & Noble does every other day, that I only have one day to take advantage of outrageous savings.
Look, I get it. You want to sell me shit. And you want me to buy it today, not tomorrow. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret here they probably didn’t teach you in your Overhyped Management 201 Class at Harvard: I don’t care. There is absolutely no priority for me to have to buy a Blu-Ray player by Thursday, or heaven forbid, I might miss out on unbelievable savings. I don’t really need a Blu-Ray player. I have one. And I bought it at a convenient time when I actually felt like I needed one. It happened to be on a day when I was in the mood to go to the store, look at the different choice, and then chose the one that fit me best. I didn’t buy it because some screaming sales pitch indicated that I was running out of time, like some episode of 24 where Jack Bauer has to torture his secretary for information about terrorist activities.
I understand the economy sucks, and you need to make money. But the more I keep being hit by hyped pitches to buy things, the less I want to buy. And no, I’m no fooled by the barrages of letters and emails that indicate that you are responding to my requests for information because I would remember if I was interested in buying a Kia car, which prompted you to send me an email as if you’re answering my inquiry instead of writing me out of the blue, hoping I might be stupid enough to think, “you know, I don’t remember ever thinking about buying a Kia vehicle, but if he says I stopped by and looked at one, it must be true.”
There’s a whole slough of literature written on the attempt to convince people to buy things they weren’t interested in to begin with. It’s the stuff often referred to as “foot in the door” techniques, and there’s an entire shunned practice that evolves from it called “bait and switch” where you advertise one thing and then try to sell us something we weren’t interested in. But this whole hurried approach to sales really needs to end because I’m getting really tired of opening mail and discovering I have twenty seconds to respond or the whole world will explode.
Part of the problem with a lot of marketing today is that there seems to be a lot less interest in matching people with the things they want to buy, rather than mass mailing everyone under the sun in hopes of finding someone who might want to buy something they weren’t interested in at all. But I’ll let you in on a bigger secret and that’s that if you’re really interested in selling to me, you’ll offer something really of good value at a good price and then convince me you’re the only one willing to do that. Don’t try to get me into your store in one day. Just convince me that your selection is better than your competition, and I’m probably going to make it to your business place. An example: I’m really interested in the new game Skyrim, made by Bethesda. But it’s overly expensive for a computer game. Offer it to me for a better price, and I’ll probably buy it. Offer it to me for the same price and add a lot of extra features to the sale, and I might still buy it. But sending me nonstop messages about how I need to buy it immediately or I will somehow miss out on the fun, and you’re not setting up a sale. At all. You see, I can wait you out. You, on the other hand, need the sale. It’s that simple. It is in YOUR best interest to get me to want to buy from you. Hype doesn’t do it. Expiration periods of pretend sales won’t do it. A good sale that seems pretty honest, well, that works wonders.
Businesses are constantly making the mistake of thinking most consumers are stupid, or easily fooled. We’re not. Some are, but they’re really a minority and not a sustainable business model. But smart consumers who will continue to buy your product if you offer value, service and consistency, well, those are the ones you should be going after. But your current model isn’t doing it.
So, take your time because I’m not going anywhere. You, a lot like Netflix that keeps trying to convince me I have a short time to “come back” to their “great deal”, might be. And it may not be where you want to end up.
I noticed that retailers are starting to send me their “Black Friday” advertisements, telling me of all of the great savings they will be offering on the day after Thanksgiving. I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I don’t care. Black Friday is one of those “holidays” that comes once a year that I completely ignore as much as possible, no matter how much hype keeps coming my way concerning the pseudo holiday. You see, I’ve discovered that over the years almost always one of two things happen with a Black Friday sale for me: It’s either sold out by the time I get to it, or it wasn’t really much of a deal to begin with.
The first problem is easy to understand. There are people who stay up late at night and rush the store the second it opens. People fight each other in the aisles, trying to get at that on sale sweater that they never would have bought on any other day, but they’ll kill you for the chance to get that sweater to the cash register. Sure, every now and then you hear about someone getting a “great deal” on something they bought, but for the most part, every person who raves about Black Friday to me usually tells me about some red and green sweater she bought “for only five bucks!” or some electronic item that they managed to pry from the dead hands of a child they beat like a baby seal for the pleasure of paying for it. And I nod, like I’m supposed to do, and I think about how I’m so glad I didn’t have to deal with the crowds that day.
You see, I hate crowds. Especially the kinds of crowds that come out on a Black Friday. These aren’t people watching crowds, flocks of friendly people partaking in holiday cheer, or even underfed supermodels who might be interesting to stare at as they shop for diet Yogurt, but these are crazed, ravenous creatures who seem to equate sales with a necessity on Maslow’s heirarchy of needs, and I just don’t buy into it. For me, dealing with hellbent people who are after sales is a lot like fishing with zombies. It might be interesting to experience in theory, but I’m not sure I’d want to spend the day throwing a line into the water around a bunch of people who want to eat my brains.
So, this year, when Black Friday comes around, I’ll stay at home and do something different, like anything that’s not shopping. For the rest of you, good luck on finding your sales. I’ll listen to your fascinating stories of beating up a school kid who was after that pair of shoes you just had to have, but that doesn’t mean I really care.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is turning out to be a very interesting flashpoint in modern day history. If you follow the news, commentators are going out of their way trying to explain away something they can’t explain by using metaphors and comparisons to previous movements that are completely void of any dichotomous connections. What is simply happening is that something new has emerged, and the media has no way of explaining it.
So, let me explain what is really going on. What we have are a lot of people who are pissed off because the American Dream (or whatever international aspirations they might have if they’re not Americans) isn’t working out as originally sold by the marketers known as government and media. It used to be if you worked hard, put in your time, and did the right things, you would come out ahead, and that your children would end up doing better than you did before. This would continue on for generations until several generations later the new species wouldn’t even recognize the old species.
That works great in theory. However, the theory doesn’t account for the concept of greed. A capitalistic system works really well at bringing the society to a higher level of achievement, but what doesn’t get discussed is that not everyone rises up with the new tide of prosperity. In reality, a capitalistic system is designed to benefit those who are capable of taking advantage of the process, and in a zero sum economy, someone generally has to do horribly bad in order for someone to do horribly well. Socialism is the economic system where everyone comes out equally, although not always at the best they could be (as government isn’t known for raising tides of boats of economies all that well when there’s no incentive to provide for upward mobility). But capitalism is a different animal, and equality has never been a promise, a guarantee or even a necessity. Instead, capitalism promises prosperity for some, and desparity for most others. What we’ve only recently discovered is that 99% is desparity while 1% is prosperity in this zero sum game.
That is why people are pissed. You see, most people don’t want to be part of the losing side of economics. Yet, whenever this gets addressed, the 1% (and the clueless numbers in the 99% hoodwinked by the 1% to believe that they’ll one day have a shot at being one of the 1%) does everything possible to make the 99% sound clueless, making such commentary irrelevant, and even more important: Unheard.
But one thing happened that wasn’t a part of the capitalistic dilemma: Education. Many more people achieved education than a capitalistic system can actually maintain. Oh, this works out well if the education is vocational in nature, in that everyone exists for the purpose of feeding the greedy animal, but if the education is social in nature, and people become made aware, rather than compliant, then there would eventually be a reckoning. It’s somewhat inevitable, although I don’t even think Marx or Hegel predicted it would happen as quickly as it is beginning to occur; they suspected much more saturation would have been necessary first, but who knew?
That’s where we are today. The movement has no leadership because there is no one who can steer a crowd to inevitable collapse. There is no rallying cry that can push people in that direction. And there is really no rallying cry that can push a population back in the other direction once the masses have been unleashed.
So, the question is: Are we there yet? If we’re at the inevitable saturation point that leads to eventual destruction of the capitalistic system, then nothing exists that can push the movement backwards. If we’re not there yet, the people who hold onto the reins of power will continue to use their influence to push the masses back to compliance again. But one thing is certain: There will be no actual compromise because the holders of power cannot compromise without acknowledging that the system was flawed to begin with.
So we’re left with the question of whether or not there is enough anger, frustration and disgust amongst the population to fuel a movement further to a point where changes will actually take place. As collective action theory points out, people will gather together for a common purpose, but if they do not receive a payoff for their efforts, the movement dies until it raises steam again. If they do receive a payoff, they may settle down, thinking they achieved their goals but not really satisfied (meaning they will eventually have to rise again and start over from scratch), or they will be so insulted by the compromises asked of them that the movement will fuel itself and sustain itself further until it actually acquires the goals it sets for itself.
Either way, no one is going to sit down and write out a list of wants and needs to sustain the movement (something the media keeps asking for). It will either achieve what it needs to achieve (fulfilling a sense of punctuated equilibrium) and return rhetoric to a sense of order again, or it will overwhelm everything until it becomes the new world order itself.
