I will admit that this is a rant, I don’t like it any more than you do but I have to get this off of my chest.
There are two parts of this rant. First, when did the Golden Rule go out of style? Second, Why do we as consumers want receive everything as cheaply as possible (if not free) and still expect the highest quality product available?
These are a couple of things that I have been noticing as we become more and more dependent on technology. I think there comes a point were we have to step back and check our selves a little bit realizing what we have.
Back story:
So, at work today we realized that our email had not been sending messages to our customers for about 18 hours. As it turns out our service provider changed the DNS numbers on the server causing our system to fail. Does it suck? Sure there is not arguing that. Should we have been notified? Probably although we don’t know the exact situation that the service provider was in. My point is that this is how technology works now. We love it, we are dependent on it, and then GLITCH and all of a sudden the world comes to the end. Remember when letter got lost in the mail? It happened all the time but somehow we managed to deal with the problems and move on.
My Thoughts
What I find interesting in this situation is that our company makes changes to our website which customers use to order all the time. Do we notify each and every customer every time we make a change that could potentially backfire and cause them an outage? NOPE we sure don’t and we have like 20 customers using the site. Now think about how many customers a service provider has, thousands probably more, but yet we seem to hold them to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. Interesting isn’t it. Ok maybe not but the point is if we are unwilling to recognize our own shortcomings in communication, how much can we really complain about others shortcomings.
Secondly, there is so much free technology available that we could not have dreamed of 10 – 20 years ago and it is FREE. My first computer was a Tandy 1000 from Radio Shack, I don’t remember how much it cost but it was a lot, and you could’t do anything except play a crappy version of Jordan vs. Bird. Now I am sitting her writing this Rant listening to Google Music Beta (free), writing this blog on WordPress (free), I have Google +, Facebook, and Twitter open (FREE) It is pretty crazy to think how much we have now that we use constantly that is FREE. But God forbid something happens, Twitter goes down, or Gmail (free) stops working for a day. There is an outage in our FREE service and we think that these companies owe us personally for our discomfort! Did I mention that all this stuff is FREE? My personal opinion is that we need to get over it.
Do we pitch a fit when the toy in our happy meal breaks? No we just throw it out and say oh well it was free so it is no big deal. But with technology it is different for some reason, our free services are held to an incredibly high standard and I don’t understand why.
Along with that you have the Walmartization (yes I made that up) of how we buy products. We want to find whatever product we can as cheaply as we can possibly find it. This forces manufactures to cut corners leading to inferior products, not to mentions sending work over seas. All this so we can get an Microwave Oven for below $99.00. There comes a point where you get what you pay for and we have to deal with that. If we insist on buying things at bargain basement prices, we need to start expecting stuff to suck, or breakdown, or in the case of and ISP become unreliable and not communicate with their customers.
Do I think corporations are greedy. YES definitely. But I also think that we bring a lot of this upon ourselves as consumers by our lack of loyalty and our price driven decisions.
I have decided to be don with this now. I know it has noting to do with photography but I had to get it off my chest and out into the FREE universe that we call the world wide web.
Do unto others.
Sorry for the Rant.
You have raised a few complex questions to answer. One is the free stuff. Well, someone paid for it and pretty much we all pay for it. Advertising pays for much of our “free stuff”, you can go back to free TV. It is widely know that heavy advertising at some point raises the price of the products we buy. On the other hand, (I will probably run out of hands) advertising for large companies can raise their number of widgets sold which can reduce costs. We are becoming a society of expecting to get stuff for nothing. Half of the US population pays no income tax but gets government (read our tax money) handouts of one thing or another from unemployment, food stamps and welfare to schools, traveling free on highways and enjoying parks. The expectations for working for what we get has eroded over the past decades. When there is a natural disaster, we expect our government to bail us out. In the early 1900′s the community got together and rebuilt. This change in responsibility has made us lazy and now we look first at getting something from some one else instead of ourselves.
On a more narrow basis, I still think overall feeling that we have to accumulate as much stuff as we can as cheaply as we can so we can buy more stuff. My parents generation was much more likely to but a good quality item with cash saved and keep it for the long term no matter what new came along. They bought from local people they knew and got personal service and good advice that would keep them as a customer. Wally World offers little to no personal caring if you ever come back.
Well, how to you define a large corporation as greedy? I don’t know. We keep hearing how greedy the “Big Oil” companies are. They have huge profits. But to look at the bigger picture, their profit percentage is lower than many other large companies. Is Google greedy? Is Apple Greedy? Their profit margins are much higher as a percentage than the oil corporations. So, some of that is perception. Are the shareholders of these companies that are getting a nice return greedy? I think the huge banks are probably more greedy than many large corporations. And of course we must feel that the CEO’s and other top managers are making too much money when they get millions of dollars a year. But that is part of our capitalistic system. No, it is far from perfect and if we were not human and weren’t greedy, we would all voluntary decide that we should all get the same wadges. But I sure don’t want our government to start telling me how much I am allowed to be paid. Unless they say I can have a big fat raise. LOL
OK, enough rambling, I better do some work before I loose my job altogether.