The only constant in life is change. Some improvements are wonderful – others, not so much.
There’s also the new American business model. We’ve talked about it often, even recently. American jobs are going abroad and customer service has become customers’ self-serve. These two modern changes are how Americans have become divided by huge gaps in financial solubility and how more and more wealth goes upstairs.
This past Dec. 3, we talked about the perks of a fun trip to the mall as opposed to the convenience of shopping online. Small chain shops and privately owned stores work great, giving clients better service with a smaller staff of more invested personnel, superior to any chain. Hired employees have grown harder to come by for decades at chain stores where the number of sales assistants is based on the bottom line, serving stockholders over customers.
Still, under most circumstances, even an understaffed store is actually better than online shopping. Online, no matter how convenient, there is no help at all as customers are also the only personnel too. Occasionally, a little digging will uncover website help where further investigation may disclose a phone number (I quickly store those numbers in my phone). If we’re persistent, we may even be able to actually speak to a human and, possibly, rectify our issue.
For example, recently, the simple process of purchasing a gift certificate online for a specific store, though successfully navigated last year, left me empty handed. Finally, after two conversations with different employees on the other side of the world – and realizing they were also lost – I gave up.
No business should have a website which derails clients who want to spend money; it’s counterproductive. Yet, much online business today relies solely on the aptitude of the consumer to navigate the website and complete their own sale.
These are first world problems to be sure and, if we have them, we are blessed to say the least, because, today, too many Americans are really struggling. That brings us to the greatest fallout of corporate America’s new business practices: cutting corporate expenses and increasing profits by eliminating many types of jobs to the American people through outsourcing. Legislating employee minimums, the way we legislate other business procedures, would be a great solution. It’s the cost of doing business and committing those jobs to Americans would cut our jobless rate.
Decades of effort by workers and unions gave us fair wages, decent working conditions, and manageable work weeks. Eventually, management and owners found alternate routes to greater profits by shipping jobs to sweatshops overseas. This practice began cutting major inroads over 50 years ago, dismantling the anti-trust laws, and outsourcing the growing or manufacturing of product parts, and/or the assembling of those parts. Another great scam was trickle-down economics. Those at the top knew that there was nothing to trickle down, but increased profits would all float to the top; that was their goal.
Unencumbered and ingratiated, corporate America hasn’t missed a beat in down-sizing, restructuring, and investing more cunning than capital, ever since. Mastering illusion, they finished topping off their tanks by putting the customers to work, a tool big business perfected over a very long time, even beyond online shopping. They’ve reduced staff and increased self-service everywhere.
Still, outsourcing remains the greatest damage to America’s job market. When a help line via a hard-to-find phone number on a website sends us to India instead of Indiana, we’ve got far greater issues than confusion over a gift certificate for hand cream. When business practices create massive private wealth and devastate the survival of America’s people and economy, the need for iron-clad legislation to reel in runaway corporate power is obvious.
The need for more jobs, fair work and wages are more obvious than ever right now because so many Americans are out of work due to the impact that COVID has had on business. COVID’s impact has also focused a spotlight on the need for universal health care for Americans, as so many struggle with a lack of medical coverage too.
Because we’re avoiding interaction, we may all be doing more for ourselves these days, but overall, outsourcing and the self-help model typify what’s wrong with our economy. Too many American jobs are going abroad cheap, or being replaced by customer self-service, unsalaried. Especially now, it doesn’t work for the people or the nation at large … not by a long stretch.
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