Post Service Environment
Customers are third man out in public private ventures.
It has been coming for some time. Industry has been shaving the corners of customer service since at least the mid 1990's. I picked that time frame as that is when the internet started to prove viable for commerce. The "convenience" of shopping from home began the long slow march toward customers becoming a nuisance, but still necessary cog, in business transactions. Since humans control their wallets, the online cyborgs still need to play lip service to their wishes, at least until retailers extract the desirable 1’s and 0’s from their digital bank accounts. Think I am being overdramatic about the sorry state of customer service in today's economy? Let he who has not had this customer service exchange cast the first stone:
Automated Voice: "Thank you for calling XYZ Company, please listen to the menu carefully as options may have changed." (Yah, like I dutifully jotted the menu down last time I called!)
"For status on your order, say or press 1"
"For billing on your account, say or press 2"
"For connection to a live associate, say ‘representative' or press 3"
Me: "Representative"
A.V.: “I sorry, I did not hear that, "For status on your order, say or press 1, For billing on your account, say or press 2, For connection to a live associate, say ‘representative' or press 3"
Me: "Representative!"
A.V.: "transferring you to billing"
Me: “No, Representative”
(As I hear a series of clicks, I begin pounding the “3” button while shouting words unfit the print right before I hang up the phone because life is simply too short for this nonsense.)
For the most part, my beloved restaurant industry dodged the post internet revolution hit to service standards. Mostly because dining is an in-person experience that requires face to face contact. Sure, technology started chipping away from the personal touch in the form of on-line ordering and pay-at-the-table EMVs, but those tended to improve speed and accuracy of service, not replace it all together.
When the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2014 and healthcare payer mandates shifted the medical cost burden from employee to employer, some restaurants started adding "health and wellness" service charges to the guest check to help fray the new government induced expense. By and large, the public accepted those nominal fees (about 3-4%) as a cost of doing business and did not let that small fee interfere with their dining experience nor tipping habits. Governments did not make a stink about this obvious "end-around" the ACA, meant far more to punish businesses than to help employees, because service charges are a sales taxable event. The fact that restaurants completely shifted the ACA cost to consumers had the bonus of helping enrich state coffers.
Then came Covid-19 and the government’s overt power grab to apply the most draconian lockdowns the free world has ever known. After my own State’s governor, Tim Walz (the Restaurant Slayer) shut down my industry twice, restaurants scrambled to figure out how to survive. We stepped up or added on-line ordering, curbside pick-ups, and 3rd party deliveries. But these types of food services had new expenses. To-Go packaging, if you could find it, was dollars per order and 3rd party delivery services extracted fee percentages that would make loan sharks blush. Restaurants, in a desperate attempt to offset these new costs, followed the “health & wellness” fee mentality down the rabbit hole. To-Go fees, delivery charges and outright 20% service charges began to appear on the customer’s guest check.
Last March, I addressed this “camel’s nose under the tent” movement that was infecting my beloved industry. Here is a link to that article, The Service Charge Fix Is In. What brought this issue back to the forefront of idiotic business moves that will continue to erode the relationship between a business and its customers is this recent opinion piece by Chris J. Kennedy of The Washington Post, Diners don’t want to be surprised by service fees. In it, Kenney correctly points out the service charge conundrum restaurants face:
“The restaurant industry is stuck in a “prisoner’s dilemma” that has led to behavior more typical of predatory lenders or airlines. Frankly, many owners would like to simply raise prices, but they know they are competing with others who play the “shrouded cost” game, and, as such, they feel the sticker shock that comes with honesty will put them at a competitive disadvantage. So, fees proliferate, and customers who have stuck with us through the pandemic are increasingly exasperated by charges for service, employee wellness and covid-19 recovery, all with no discernible improvement in service and an increasingly impersonal experience.”
Why does it matter if a restaurant charges less for a hamburger but adds a 20% service charge to the final bill? Quite simply, inserting the business between the customer and server by extracting a set percentage service charge diminishes personal relationship between the two. Just like the ACA inserting government mandated fee structures into healthcare decisions fractured the one-on-one relationship patients had with their doctors. And, if destroying healthcare and restaurants with these service killing models was not bad enough, the entire globe is set to jettison customer service standards all together in favor of the most devious public private scheme ever to emerge from the essence of the “Communist Manifesto.”
When ESG cheerleaders successfully coerce business, through elaborate pomp and circumstance parades at the gates of hell, to abandon their core missions and chase economically foolish ESG policies, customers service will further erode. ESG chasing businesses will be servicing their “public private” lord and customers will simply become an annoying digital imprint and thus be as innocuous and worthless as the 1’s and 0’s in their soon to be digitalized Federal bank account.
The next time you are at the mercy of an on-line robot after desperately trying to summon a live representative, know that exchange was not fashioned by the company IT or customer service departments. The frustrating sequence the automated voice walks you through was designed by the dark lord himself, to weaken your customer service expectations in preparation for the hell that waits all who travel down this incendiary public private path. Whether it is the government inserting itself between patient and doctor, restaurants inserting itself between customer and server or ESG loving bankers inserting themselves between customer and company, the customer is third man out in these business transactions.
Adam Smith wrote the “Wealth of Nations,” first published the year of my country’s birth. It his book, Smith discussed the importance of free trade to a vibrate economy. Smith wrote,
“In a free trade, an effectual combination cannot be established but by the unanimous consent of every single trader, and it cannot last longer than every single trader continues of the same mind.”
Any deviation from the unanimous consent between the two benefiting parties, whether by adopting corporate policies with penalties (service charges,) legislative interference (healthcare mandates) or economically crushing ESG standards further erodes free trade and places one-sided protection on the seller at the expense of the buyer. To come to any other conclusion takes the mental gymnastics of a Keynesian doing backflips on a balance beam while holding pitcher of Jim Jones Kool-Aid without spilling a drop (otherwise known as an economist.)
Ever since 1776, progressives began a slow and methodical march towards re-enslaving those who dared breathe free and fought a tyrannical king to secure that beautiful and God decreed desire. Many Americans still love the flag and praise the Constitution for its freedom giving and government limiting words. But, as often said by Steve Deace, “we are not a nation of laws and never have been, we are a nation of political will and always will be.” The will to be free takes more than passive adoration of heroes past and an American flag emoji on a Twitter handle. Freedom requires strict adherence to political philosophy that maintains that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Without equality in the eyes of the government and blind justice from her magistrates, all who would call themselves citizens are mere servants to the whims of relative meddling at the hands of political tyrants.
Stay tuned for next week’s annual address of how income tax and our “political will” grifters perverted Smith’s message and kept economics from being taught to our children. From the top rung to the bottom of society, the only difference in citizenship is the gilding of their cages; that, plus a willingness to play lip service to the government overlords pulling the proverbial marionette strings of the progressive tax code while completing ignoring the God imposed genetic code that makes them yearn to be free.