- Executives are now trained to rip people off.
This writer spent a number of years in the business world during the 1980s and 1990s, as corporate America was transforming itself from a customer-driven set of industries to a greed-driven and conscienceless wealth extraction machine for the investor class.
In the early 1990s a group of us were attending a corporate training session run by ex-hippies who now did in-house “teambuilding” exercises for large corporations. As they set us up for our various role-playing games they told us anecdotes about business “innovations,” anecdotes that were meant to inspire “out-of-the-box thinking” among the middle-management executives in attendance.
The first story they told was about the Gillette Company. As most non-bearded men know, the Gillette business model is a sneaky one. The company ropes customers in with low-cost razors and then charges an outrageous amount for replacement blades.
Out of roughly 60 people in attendance, only one other person and I objected that this was a deceptive model.
The next example was that of a pay phone company which wanted to increase turnover in the use of its phones. With barely restrained glee, the instructor described the “brilliant” thinking of a junior executive who proposed that bricks be put in the handsets of all their phones. In the same “brainstorming” session, another executive suggested making the surfaces underneath the phones slanted, so that people couldn’t leave their things there while they spoke on the phone.
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The net result was that people paid a quarter to use a pay phone, but then grew uncomfortable and were unable to complete their calls. The beauty of it (from the instructor’s point of view) was that they didn’t even know why they were hanging up. They merely had an unsatisfying customer experience, while the phone company got to turn over customers more quickly and collect more quarters. Again, only two or three people objected that this was poor customer service, and an underhanded way to deal with customers.
If you multiply our experience ten thousandfold, you have an idea of the enculturation which is taking place every day in companies all across the country. That’s not to say there aren’t companies that still believe in customer service; there are, and I’m grateful every time I encounter one. But the corporate culture of America has become a culture of cheating, manipulation and greed.
(The pay phone industry in this country is dead. Karma, as they say, is a bitch.)