Corporate apocalypse: Feeding the hand that bites us

1920: The customer is always right.

2020: The stockholder is always right.

This ain’t your grandfather’s capitalism. The myth of American capitalism endures: If you have good ideas and work your ass off, you’ll get ahead. But the reality is very different: Instead of rewarding hard work and pursuing customer satisfaction, modern capitalism is designed to reward shareholders, and everyone else be damned.

Two things made this possible:

1. Corporations replaced small business as the dominant force in the nation’s economy.

2. Convenience replaced service as the most important element (along with price) in the consumer’s daily lives.

Convenience is king

As customers demand more convenience, business is motivated to provide it. But doing so requires technological advances that, in turn, require investment – often more investment than a small business can afford to make. It’s only natural (and sometimes, perhaps, essential) that such a business seek outside money to finance the necessary improvements.

The problem is that, once a business secures financial backers, it becomes responsible to them rather than its customers, much less its employees. Shareholders want a business to maximize profits and minimize expenses, regardless of the cost to worker morale, consumer service or even the company’s reputation. Just hire a glitzy PR firm and make some strategic donations to charity, and you can still look like a good guy even when you treat your employees and your customers like shit.

Andrew Carnegie used part of his fortune to create libraries, but does that make him a “good guy” when he earned that money by paying his employees a pittance and pushing them beyond their limits?

A return to the late-19th century world of Carnegie becomes easier when convenience and immediacy are valued more highly than quality and service.

When service doesn’t matter as much as convenience, the people who provide that service become expendable. When you pump gas yourself, you don’t need an attendant to do it for you. When you buy goods at self-service check stands, you don’t need cashiers anymore. When people demand news the moment it “breaks,” you don’t need copy editors to check for spelling or accuracy, you just need a program to make sure you’re online first.

The Matrix has you

But in demanding convenience, consumers have put themselves in a bind – and, in many cases, have cut off their collective nose to spite their face. How convenient is it, for instance, to navigate a phone tree, then wait on hold for an hour until the next customer service rep is free to take your call (or start all over again when you press the wrong button or you’re “accidentally” cut off)? How convenient is it to use one of those self-service check stands when the scanner keeps malfunctioning? Or to check the accuracy of a story via Snopes because journalism is done on the fly, rather than with care and precision?

Then there’s the identity theft that comes with using debit cards and computer programs vulnerable to hackers. Now that’s really convenient! (Note sarcasm.)

Here’s the rub: Convenience doesn’t always make life easier, at least not in the long run. It often just frees up more time for us to become busier, take on more commitments and, in the end, become more stressed out. We’ve devalued human interaction as consumers, and that interaction becomes the first thing we sacrifice in our personal lives when we start to feel overloaded. The result is a vicious circle of busyness and isolation.

We become, in a very real sense, dependent on – even addicted to – convenience and instant gratification. And, as with any addiction, the “highs” get less intense, the “lows” get lower, and the dependency grows stronger as time goes on.

Corporations know this and, as we become more dependent, they have less incentive to provide that high. Because. They. Have. Us. Hooked. Once they do, shareholder and consumer interests that once seemed aligned in the quest for convenience are no longer in sync. For corporations, convenience was always just a means to an end: maximizing profits for shareholders. Once it no longer serves that purpose, corporations will discard it like yesterday’s news.

Toxic capitalism

When’s the last time you stopped at a full-service gas station or were put directly through to a live operator willing and able to answer your questions? It’s probably been a while. That kind of service has largely gone by the wayside, and (in most places) you no longer have any option but to pump your own gas or navigate that phone tree. It all happened right under our noses, so gradually we barely noticed. But now, here we are, and we’re no turning back.

Once they’ve eliminated all our other options, corporations have no more incentive to provide service, convenience, low prices or anything else. The consumer becomes irrelevant, and only the shareholder matters. Instead of personal service, we get automated phone trees and overseas operators. Instead of quality, we get planned obsolescence. We were supposed to have learned this lesson more than a century ago, when monopolies were working employees to death (literally in some cases) and foisting off bogus “miracle cures” on consumers. But apparently, we’re going to have to learn it all over again.

Capitalism works well when it encourages competition; when it discourages it, it’s toxic.

Want evidence? What ever happened to Marshall Field’s or Rich’s or Filene’s or Jordan Marsh? They’re all Macy’s now. Every single one of them. In the 1960s, there were dozens of regional discount retailers; today, there’s Walmart. And Target.

As Facebook has all but cornered the market on social media access, has it become more flexible or more controlling? Have those controls become more in tune with the user or the shareholder? Since Facebook went public, its quest to maximize profits by allowing corporations access to personal profiles – and by looking the other way on Russian interference – has been widely publicized. But we still use it because most of our friends are there, not on Ello or MeWe. We’re addicted. We’re stuck.

Tainted government

The government, meanwhile, enables and accelerates this process. It’s no secret why this happens: The same corporations that have the money to invest in business have the money to lobby Capitol Hill – to their benefit, and to the detriment of their competitors.

Many of those competitors are small businesses, who then have little choice but to go public themselves so they can get money to pay for their own lobbyists.  

The 2018 tax cut is a great example of how this works. Whom did it benefit most? Small businesses that need help to compete or corporations that will use the advantages to consolidate their stranglehold and eliminate even more choices?

We know the answer to that question.

Before the trust-busters broke up Standard Oil’s monopoly at the dawn of the 20th century, cartoonists portrayed it as an octopus, with its tentacles wrapped around everything from the U.S. Capitol to statehouses to investors. Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, Google and others are on the brink of becoming today’s version of Standard Oil.

Customer service died decades ago. Convenience is on its last legs. Can a return to snake oil and sweatshops be far behind?

Memo to Businesses: When You Provide a Service, It's Not About You

Why should a baker be forced to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple if he's against same-sex marriage? 

The answer is simple: If you offer a service to the public at large, you shouldn't be able to make a distinction because of your religion, your preferences or your ethics. Why? Because it's not about you.

Of course, you should be able to exercise your religious rights when it's just about you. No one is forcing you to marry someone of the same sex, but what business of yours is it what someone else decides to do? You won't be eating dinner with that same-sex couple when they come home from work. You won't be sharing their bed. You won't be cleaning their cat's litter box, taking their kids to school, washing their dishes or paying their hospital bills. You won't be reaping the benefits of that marriage - the love, the retirement plan, the vacations spent together - and it's not your responsibility. Which is to say, you don't get a say.

Because it's not about you.

Those actions only become "about you" when you engage in them yourself, when they become an integral part of your own life. That's the distinction.

If you're serving the general public as a businessperson, the service you provide is not about you, either. That service is provided for your customers. It's about them. Hence the old saying (too often ignored these days) that the customer is always right. That saying doesn't come with a qualifier like "as long as he's a straight, white, Protestant, Bible-believing male who roots for the Dallas Cowboys." It stands on its own, just as the money exchanged in any such transaction stands on its own. It's legal tender for all debts public and private. Says so right there on the currency. If the money doesn't discriminate, why should the service? It's a two-way street.

Here's the good news: If the service is about the customer, the money is about you, the merchant. You get to use it to buy school supplies for your kids, take a vacation with your spouse, buy cat litter for your feline friend, and so forth. Is that really so bad? You worry that someone else's same-sex wedding is damaging your marriage in some nebulous, undefined way, but isn't that money actually affecting your marriage far more tangibly and directly? And in a good way!

And you shouldn't worry about churches being forced to perform weddings for same-sex couples, either. That's a different slice of cake altogether. The distinction is simple: Unlike businesses, churches aren't offering their services to the general public. They're offering them to people of their own faith because, by definition, a church is built on moral and doctrinal agreements among members of the same faith. 

Religious institutions such as churches, mosques and temples wouldn't exist without the faith to which they're attached. It's their fundamental raison d'etre. The same cannot be said for businesses owned by Christian, Muslim, Wiccan or Buddhist owners. They aren't in business to spread or facilitate their faith; they're in business to make a living by serving the general public. If their religion conflicts with their ability to provide the service they're offering, they should find another line of business - or, if they prefer, another religion. The choice is theirs.

This is, in fact, exactly what an Alabama judge decided to do: To avoid issuing licenses to same-sex couples, he decided to stop issuing licenses altogether. According to the judge, the law states that counties "may" (as opposed to "must") issue marriage licenses. So he's taking his county out of the marriage business.

Clearly, the government isn't a private business, and the judge's action amounts to using the law as an excuse to enshrine a form of institutional bias. But I have to give the judge credit for one thing: He understands the principle that it's all or nothing. If you offer a service to the general public, you must serve everyone in the general public equally. Your only alternative is to pack up your tent and go home - where you can eat that cake you refused to bake for that same-sex couple (if it isn't stale by the time you get there and doesn't aggravate your diabetes).

If you're in business to serve the general public, that includes people of both genders, of all races, creeds and sexual orientations. If you don't feel comfortable providing a service, stop providing that service ... to everyone. But don't pretend you have a problem with the service itself when your real issue is with the person on the other end - someone who has every right to live her own life independently without being told by some business she isn't good enough. If you think you can or should play a role in her life by limiting her options, that's your ego, not your ethics, talking.

And as I said, it's not about you.