I ran across a line the other day that struck me as incomparably brilliant. I wish I knew its author. “You will notice the decline of our Western empire one 'isolated' inconvenience at a time.” I posted it on Facebook, and some of my friends liked it. Naturally, it turned into a discussion about presidential politics, which was not my point. Having two dolts as candidates are starring symptoms, but the real issues are the tiny ones. They're the creeping vines that are invading our lives. As I type this, for example, I find myself unexpectedly in O'Hare Airport. The series of unfortunate events that led me here is too tortuous to repeat, but I can tell you that it began this morning at 3 a.m. In the unlikely event it ends as currently scheduled, it will be 3 a.m. tomorrow. But I will draw your attention to one annoyance that will provide a better, more fitting entryway into my subject for today: There is currently no dental floss for sale in O'Hare, the ninth busiest airport in the world. None.
It has always been fair to say — and I so often have — that life is just one damn thing after another. But lately the damned things are arriving more often and are more vexing, not least because they seem inexplicable. The mystery of the missing dental floss, for example.
We all have our stories, don't we? These days nothing works. Any new effort of any kind will be quickly thwarted by one bureaucracy or another, in my case the management of Hudson News. They have a monopoly on dental floss, which means they'll get around to replenishing the stocks when they get around to it.
Often the frustration arises from circumstances that operate at a remove from all human contact, for example a required website or an app. Anonymous electronic communication is the preferred methodology today, for reasons I'll explain.
THIRD IN A SERIES
In previous essays I've explained why our political system is a disaster, constantly promoting to the top the worst of us. It's the two-party system doing exactly what the founders warned a two-party system would do: we are now a nation of, by and for the two parties. If you disagree I suggest you consider how the Democratic nominee for president was chosen.
In another article I explained why instructions, including those for high-tech applications and products, are so useless and maddening. It's because they are invariably written by experts, while instructions should be written by first-timers – people who are new to the system or product.
In this third effort, I'll explain why all of us spend so much of our time engaged in endless hassles with the people and companies we are trying to give our money to. Phrased that way, the absurdity is clear: why would a company make it difficult to spend money with them? Aren't revenues their sole purpose?
Well, no and yes. Revenues are essential, but their first purpose is profit. That’s why they exist. Making profits means selling something for more than it costs to produce, which means every cost-cutting measure results in greater profits. That's why customers are so nettlesome – most are disinclined to simply open their wallets and fork over cash for nothing, which is precisely the model most companies – particularly the largest ones – are attempting to perfect. That's where the difficulties arise.
As I've repeatedly said, if a person from the 20th century had slept through the intervening decades, the most surprising thing he'd discover upon awakening is that companies today hate their customers. I admit that's a bit of hyperbole. It's more accurate to say companies resent the hell out of them for the reason I stated above. It is true, however, that they deeply hate their employees. The more time employees spend with customers the more it costs, with these costs cutting directly into the bottom line. Therefore the best system includes two facets: the cheapest possible service workers and the least possible contact with customers.
That’s why a determined and inevitably lengthy pursuit of answers will eventually lead you to some poor bastard who is sitting in an unairconditioned warehouse in Delhi. Now, as for the poor bastards who are today making a buck an hour to assist you: God Bless 'em. They are required to spend hours a day listening impotently to the impotent outrage of customers.
The ones who established the system, and profit from it, are untouchable, to borrow a phrase. They see you as a nuisance, and further see massive employee burnout as acceptable losses. Indeed, because of the enormous turnover there are now artificial intelligence programs that quietly measure the misery of the phone bank person and turn on their favorite music when they are about to blow. Think about that. Think about what that says.
We customers and phone bank workers find ourselves shunted to a side track, separate and stalled, while the business continues to fly down the main line. The employees provide us with rote and useless answers, and we seethe. Neither they nor we have any other place to turn. There is no recourse to anyone who can actually do something.
We are all victims of this system.
NEXT
Among the very few laws (theories) of economics that hold true everywhere and at all times is this: monopolies produce inferior products and services and charge outrageous prices. The largest monopoly in the world is the U.S. Federal Government, which is not just the sole provider by law of numerous services, but also collects payments for said services at the point of a gun. That means there is virtually no incentive to save money – through streamlining, for example. That's why we now have 342 separate economic development programs, 130 programs serving the disabled, another 130 programs for at-risk youth and 72 federal programs to ensure the availability of clean drinking water.
We also have 45 different federal programs conducting federal criminal investigations.
But there have long been private monopolies, most famously those of Rockefeller oil, Carnegie steel and Ma Bell telephones. Fifty years ago, for example, it cost me a quarter a minute to call my girlfriend in Baton Rouge from my dorm room in Shreveport. That’s how I ended up working at the seedy revolving bar in the Carousel on Christmas Day l975. The bill had to be paid, and at $2.75 an hour that wasn't easy to do.
Today I have numerous choices for long-distance calls, including many apps that are free (sort of; they're selling my information). But if I want to use a cell phone, it's a different story.
Cell phone service in the U.S. is ludicrously expensive – about twice that of the U.K. Our providers are nevertheless ludicrously incompetent at providing service to their customers. Given there are several competing companies, the question naturally arises: How can that be?
The answer is: cell phone service companies constitute an oligopoly, which is defined as a market sector controlled by a small number of companies.
Monopolies other than the government are illegal, of course. The Securities and Exchange Commission will sometimes rule against two or more market leaders merging. But there are ways of creating oligopolies that aren't just legal, but may as well be enshrined in law. That is, they are literally creations of the law in a process that is known as regulatory capture: the rules are written to favor one or more companies.
Let's pause a moment for a little background: In the United States, there are three types of law: legislation (statutes); executive agency rules (regulations); and case law (court decisions). Washington, DC, and its neighboring communities are the wealthiest in the nation because they are primarily populated by federal employees and by lobbyists who are there to purchase legislation and regulations that work to their advantage. Often the bills passed by Congress were written by the lobbyists. Often the regulations promulgated by the executive agencies were written by the lobbyists.
Sometimes this may serve a single company. Here is IT expert Mark Atwood explaining why the world's IT systems collapsed on Friday, July 19.
“Notice that everybody getting hit hard by this is in a heavily regulated industry: finance, airlines, healthcare, etc. That's because [their] regulations include IT security mandates, and Crowdstrike has positioned themselves as the only game in town for compliance. Hence you get this software monoculture prone to everything getting hit at once like this.”
Nowadays we have many informal cartels, perhaps most importantly Big Pharma. Under FDA rules, a new drug must undergo extensive testing. Very extensive. Indeed, the cost of FDA approval for a new drug now runs $2.6 billion on average. The big drug companies love this because it keeps out all but the precious few who have the pockets to pay.
It is comically ironic that the toughest environmental regulations are written not by environmentalists but rather by their enemies: the chemical and petrochemical megacorporations. Exxon-Mobile-Shell-Chevron can always raise their prices – whatcha gonna do? – but no one has the bread to enter the market as a newcomer. That's the idea.
Kojo Quartey described the essential dynamic at work in an oligopoly using facts and figures drawn from a “60 Minutes” report on the greatest overspender in the world, the U.S. military. He noted that in the 1990s 51 defense companies merged into five large companies. “The 60 Minutes report,” he noted, “used words such as 'extortion.'” CBS said by the end of the decade a shoulder-fired missile that sold in 1991 for $25,000 was priced at more than $400,000.
In our new home in Seguin, Texas, the next available appointment time at the Department of Motor Vehicles is in early 2025. The fact that everyone who drives is required to have an up-to-date license is immaterial.
The same dynamic – the use of all measures to avoid serving you -- is now at work among the companies that most often make your life miserable, including your cell phone provider, airlines, medical facilities, insurance companies and every other industry that provides services that are sometimes or always necessary. Sometimes it isn't an oligopoly at work, per se. Sometimes its regulatory capture of another sort. Like the fact that by law the prescription for your eyeglasses expires in 12 months. Or the legal requirement that a dentist x-ray your mouth pretty much every time you walk through the door. These are profit centers, not medical necessities, written into law by the profiteers.
Last October I went three weeks without a phone because my old carrier, Verizon, couldn't be bothered to cooperate with my new carrier, Sprint. I spent hours on the phone and in the office of Sprint. The poor bastards who work there eventually made it work.
What was I supposed to do? Change to a company that cares about the kind of service I receive? There are none. There are no carriers who want to speak with you, no doctors who don't ask you to provide all of the details of your health history every time you visit. Insurance companies are a nightmare, as are utilities companies. The list goes on and on. The horror stories are endless because the horrors are purposeful. They want you to just give up. They want you to just shut up and send your money, preferably via automatic electronic withdrawals.
That's why every company now wants you to utilize their app, which is almost always a confusing disaster because it was written by an expert and never taken for a test drive by a novice. Can't figure it out? Call the rep in Bangalore. But their app does much more than that – it tracks your every move because that's where the real money often lies – selling your information to other companies.
AND FINALLY
Now here is my conclusion. I admit I am one hundred percent confident in everything I've said to this point. The following regards the timing and is somewhat speculative.
In recent days I've heard from many that we have now reached the final collapse, the ninth ring of bureaucratic hell, as a result of the covid shutdown. It's a good theory. Many companies learned they could continue functioning very well with no personal contact with customers. Indeed, many had never done better. Profits had never been higher. That raised an obvious question: Why return to the days of customer service?
That is the state we find ourselves in now.
Don't like British Airways? Cool. Find someone who's better. An airline that cares about you. I dare ya. Don't like the way your cell phone carrier responds to your questions? Too bad. The next guy won't be any better.
To put it simply, our service companies (and our various government bureaucracies) have us all by the short and curlies. That's what I mean when I say that the largest American companies hate us. We stand in the way of doing what they would like to do, which is to simply extract money from us while doing nothing. The people who run these companies have no personal integrity and no pride in a job well done. They're all about the money. (We'll discuss why this is the case in another article.}
If this seems too strong, consider this: who does provide you with good service? Is it the sole proprietor of the neighborhood pub? Or your auto mechanic? Or maybe the guy who mows your lawn. They aren't perfect, of course, because no one is. But they are likely to at least pretend to give a damn because they know you can easily go elsewhere. But when you engage with one of these oligopolies, you're stuck.
You aren't a human being – you're just a wallet to be drained. At their convenience.
Get used to it.