The Customer is Always Right

How governments became our biggest customers

Ever heard the statement, "The customer is always right?" In a true capitalistic economy, living by that statement is a necessary component to overcoming competition. However, is the customer always right? Is it right to request ketchup for a grilled salmon? Is it right to order a filet mignon well done? Is it right to act indignant about having to wait 20 minutes for a table at 7:00 PM on a Friday night with no reservation? Of course not, but that is not what the adage, "the customer is always right" really means. What businesses strive for is happy satisfied customers. If mutilating a piece of fish or steak makes a customer happy, then so be it, the customer is always right!

Why is customer satisfaction so important in a capitalist environment? Because happy customers spread positive remarks about businesses mostly by word of mouth and unhappy customer leave one-star reviews and nasty novelettes on Facebook and Yelp. Exceeding customers' expectations is the cheapest form of advertising and overcoming a bad review is the world's most expensive. The customer is always right (happy) is just good policy and good managers and chefs need to leave their egos at home.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the kitchen. A new and far more powerful restaurant customer emerged. And this customer has deep pockets and if unhappy, can lay more hurt on a business than 10,000 negative reviews. This new customer is government, and it does not care about, effort, investment or service to the public at large. This new customer cares about compliance, not a universally and even-handily compliance across the spectrum of all businesses, but a targeted and politically motivated compliance. And with customer number one emerging as restaurants’ most significant customer, the public consumer becomes an annoyance, an inconvenience and must step aside so that the table may be prepared for Government Creosote!

If you are a restaurant, you are very familiar with how your biggest customer affects your daily operations. Long gone are the days that restaurant owners focus on making a better hamburger or designing the next great customer experience. Now restaurant owners, in serving their largest customer, must learn how to comply with and remit complicated and redundant sales taxes, interpret and deploy Department of Labor standards, study ever changing health codes, and pay thousands of dollars to CPAs to comply with local, state and federal income taxes. Modern restaurant managers must become experts in healthcare administration and compliance, laws regarding tipped employees and the Family Leave Act. On top of all that, if you are a restaurant that did not get “shared sacrificed” out of business during the Covid lockdowns, you became very familiar with and applied for SBA EIDL loans, PPP, RRF and the most complicated and poorly executed “emergency” help program ever conceived by any government known as Employee Retention Credit (ERC.)

Let me tell you about this little gem of a program administered by the IRS. ERC is a federal program whereby restaurants affected by state or local government shutdowns due to Covid-19 could apply for a partial credit of Federal payroll taxes. Just to figure out if a restaurant qualifies and to file for the refund takes a team of CPA months the scour through reams of payroll and financial documents.  Once it is determined that a credit is due, they must amend past quarterly 941 payroll submissions with the IRS. The moment ERC has been applied for, both State and Federal governments treat this yet to be process, approved and paid credit as income. Thus, the restaurant owner must pay income taxes on funds not yet approved or returned from the IRS. The average response time for ERC refunds from the IRS has been about 10 months with many restaurants waiting well over a year to receive relief of payroll taxes that they already paid a team of highly skilled CPA to calculate and income taxes on in the process. Now remember, this program was all done in the name of giving restaurants immediate relief from business killing Government Covid policies. Many restaurant operators have been forced to seek bridge loans to cover the ERC filing and tax expenses. In talking to one such owner, she waited on hold with the IRS for seven hours to finally talk to a representative only to learn that they were in possession of her ERC application but could give no information about when the funds would be dispersed.

How did American businesses let this giant and demanding customer through the front door? It was a slow boil of multiple circumstances that brought us to this current and unsustainable state. Here they are in somewhat chronological order:

·       Y2K was the first manufactured world-wide scare. The media over-hyped fear that every computer in the world would suddenly come to a halt at 12:01 AM midnight on January 1, 2000, and the Four Horsemen would be released upon the all of humanity. That singular event proved that the media could manipulate a narrative on a world stage.

·       The financial collapse of 2008 whereby banks and investment houses duped investors into buying junk mortgage-back securities that caused the housing market to implode. Instead of letting bad business decisions sink the financial institutions, the government along with the Federal Reserve bailed out the poor decision-makers with very little pushback from the public at large. This led Americans to accept disastrous fiscal policy over sound business practices.

·       The passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2014 proved governments can interfere with business of health care placing themselves as its biggest customers thus erecting a permanent wall between doctor and patient. Quite simply, if doctors wanted to be paid for services, they need to consult the holy book of HHS medical reimbursement guide, not their practice or judgement. The ACA trained independent physicians to become dependent on government.

·       Add to this government control cocktail, at least a 20-year trend of a journalism class that no longer seeks to know but knows to seek a political ideology.

·       Finally, to wrap up this “government is the biggest customer” present with a pretty gold and platinum bow, we suffer under a two-party political system where one side will do just about anything to gain and wield power and the other is so low-T that they are afraid of their constituents’ political shadow. These political leaders are far more interested in racking up social media sound bites and seeking personal political ideologies than serving their constituents. Our degenerate political class is truly only interested in redistribution, redistribution of our money to their bank accounts.

The world-wide Covid economy catastrophe simply wrapped all these seemingly disconnected prior test cases into one neat little package. Y2K conditioned the world to listen to the “experts” and panic accordingly. The housing collapse of ’08 condition the world to accept “too big to fail” and made bed fellows out of big banks and big government. ACA adoption in ’14 trained highly educated doctors to listen to government lest they do not get paid for their service. At the same time, ACA conditioned the health care seeking public that medical treatment is expensive, inefficient, and demeaning. Twenty years of “journalism” morphing from being the forth branch tasked to hold our leaders accountable into card carrying Marxist members of propaganda shielding the light of truth on Covid. The journalism class owes many thanks to social media companies for assisting and casting shadows by canceling independent voices of reason. Finally, a tip of the hat to our political leaders. Without their steadfast adherence to socialist contrived ideologies born out of some hippie professor’s head, we would never have had the weak-kneed response of “trust the science” regarding the Covid lockdowns and subsequent economic crisis that caused.

Really what remains to be discovered is if these economy crushing big government enhancing circumstances were independent and just happen to lead the world into attempting the “Great Reset” or was the last 20 years fully orchestrated? There are plenty of “Bond Villains,” especially at the World Economic Forum to question about playing puppet master to this impending collapse. But that would take a kind of journalism that we haven’t seen from some time. Don’t get me wrong, individuals are asking the questions, however the megaphones have been silenced by an unholy alliance of the media and pollical classes.

We are one wafer-thin mint away from this entire house of cards folding, but for the time being, please understand that businesses are caught in the morass of serving our biggest customer. Since the customer is always right, businesses can quite literally be kept chasing tails through meaningless and expensive compliance exercises drafted by and for their biggest customer. While the rest of the world is figuring out how to deal with inflation, businesses are in an endless comply or die cycle. We are simply doing our best to keep customer numero uno happy. Just know, as we businesses serve that final pièce de resistance, though it may be wafer-thin, it is served with a piece of our soul…