The other day, I saw a particular claim in an article which stated that two-thirds of all Americans are no more than "one flat tire from homelessness."
If you think about it, this is a pretty terrifying implication given that the USA is also held forth to be the world's largest economy and greatest financial power.
I suppose that what that particular quote suggests — beneath the surface — is that one flat tire could result in the outcome of a person having to buy new tires, or needing a car repair that they had to miss work for, resulting in them losing their job and then they become homeless, or it could be because of the delay caused by the flat tire they ended up missing some important meeting and are fired and end up homeless.
That doesn't take into account the large number of people who are just living paycheck to paycheck at any given time.
It is tempting to look around at everybody in your vicinity and find somebody to point your finger at... after all, scapegoating is a very popular pastime here in the US.
In a sense, I think we can actually blame a particular tipping point in the structure of the economy at which making the customer happy gave way to making the investors happy.
In the old paradigm of business, the idea was that you strived to create as many happy customers as you could in order to grow your business as much as possible, even if it sometimes meant that you spent some time not making as much money as you could... the idea being that when the good times returned you would be well positioned to have more loyal customers.
But there came a point in business history where enough large producers (of everything from goods to services and beyond) became public companies and became beholden to their investors always demanding ever higher rates of return every year, and often those higher rates of return resulted in practices that left customers not all that happy, but not with many alternate choices... all in service of the company making its next quarterly profit number.
I remember this already when working for a Fortune 100 computer OEM back in the 1990s, where we were pressured to pretty much get anything out the door to "make the numbers" while making customer returns and "fixes" as difficult as possible.
There have been times when I have experienced the fallout — on the receiving end — of this particular approach to business in several ways.
One was when our rechargeable electric lawn mower broke and it turned out to be all but impossible to get warranty service on it because both the seller and the manufacturer had more or less given up on warranty services, as not being effective profit centers, meaning that you end up with some third party solution far away or making the whole experience of warranty service such an ordeal that you're tempted to just buy a new lawn mower instead of getting a perfectly good — and not very old — piece of gear repaired.
Meanwhile, we recently had the good fortune to get a new propane range and cooktop on sale from Home Depot. As part of the package we were able to get delivery and installation. It was very clear that the stove needed to be converted from natural gas to propane and everybody said "no problem" and we even bought a conversion kit.
But when the delivery/installation crew came with the new stove, they said "well, we're not qualified to do liquid propane conversions."
Several calls later, it turned out that it was "a mistake" that we had even been able to buy the conversion kit in our area, and our only option was to call a an appliance service to come out and do the conversion and installation at an additional cost of $350.
Naturally, this makes us not very happy customers, but it also makes us victims of the process that is ongoing in business which is we don't really have any options. Small local appliance dealers have almost all been forced out of business by giant chain box stores... unless you want to buy super de-luxe top of the line appliances for thousands of dollars.
Which, in turn, leaves the question of how long is this kind of approach sustainable?
Things can bend only so far before they end up breaking.
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Created at 2025.02.04 22:57 PST
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