-
The Resistible Rise of the Corporate Con Artist
19 October 2012
Joe, a salesman at a respectable car dealership, is selling you a car. You drive away happy, kicking yourself gently for falling for the finance deal. But the car’s good and, for a few months, you are happy. Then, one day, Joe knocks at the door.
“Mind if I have the keys, guv?”
“What for?”
“Have to take back the sound system and the sun roof.”
“Why?
“Because we can. It’s in the small print.”
It could never happen, could it? Yes, it happens every day – car dealers don’t do it but banks, insurance companies, telcos, ISPs, energy companies, probably most service providers, as well as a few others, do it all the time. It’s all in the small print, see?
Rewarding loyal customers? No money in it. The trick is to get them in and then rip them off.
Our bank just ripped off my wife by reducing the benefits on her credit card. I recently got a call from BT offering me a quite phenomenal deal which I was eager to accept. Then I heard the words ‘to welcome you back to BT’. It was a cockup, I’d never left. When this became clear, the offer was immediately withdrawn.
Rewarding loyal customers? No money in it. The trick is to get them in and then rip them off
Years ago I sat in a meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos and watched in mounting distaste as a series of sharky young men explained they would do anything - anything - to pad the bottom line. A few, possessed of the last remaining shreds of a conscience, protested weakly and were rewarded with scorn.
It all began in 1970 when Milton Friedman wrote an essay in the New York Times explaining that companies should have no social obligations. It was a nuanced essay – Friedman was not the inhuman brain that some think he was – but the big takeway message as far as the sharky types were concerned was: “We can do what the f*** we like!”
The neo-liberalism that dominated the next few decades was, first, highly successful and then a complete disaster – not only a financial disaster but a moral one.
Some knew this would happen. The great and cultivated Ferdinand Mount warned Thatcher that her energy privatisation plans were flawed because ‘the regulators have no teeth and the operators no conscience’. But nobody paid much attantion, least of all Blair and Brown, their grovelling to the City made them the most neo-liberal PMs we could have had (and that includes Thatcher, a very cautious and genuinely conservative PM who, I believe, would have reversed this insanely radical programme as soon as she saw where it was going).
And so, though the crash has discredited neo-liberalism, it has not yet stripped the corporate con-artists out of the system. In fact, technology has made their lives much easier. We have, unprecedentedly, created and rewarded not an amoral but an immoral class who think nothing of ripping off their most loyal customers. I’d like to say it doesn’t have to be like this, but, it seems, it does.
7 Responses to “The Resistible Rise of the Corporate Con Artist”
Leave a Reply
- The Ecstasy of Bedford Park
- The Mormons and Liberty Valance
- The Bad-Good and the Good-Bad
- Compassion, Chris Huhne and Twenty Years of Respect
- Christmas Continues
- American Guns
- Cruel Jerks
- Thou Shalt Not Cover Thine Ass
- The Prig Imperiale
- Stoner: The Greatest Novel You Have Never Read
- A Boomer Bites Back
- The Dynastics of Glyndebourne
- Psychiatry on Trial
- Has Google Gone Gaga?
- The Broken Mirror of Money
- Melvyn Bragg: The Mark of the Mother
- The Future According to Google
- Osborne’s Tears for Thatcher
- Tom Waits: Growling Through the Grain
19 October 2012 at 10:09 pm
Heading back from the dealership you have realised the error of your ways, the allocated budget on the day has been shafted. As you arrived,
eager for your time in the demonstrator, you admired that model, same as the one in your dreams, with certain special modifications, sixteen grands worth of extras, strategically positioned on the forecourt like sweeties at the Tesco checkout, out of the window goes the budget. Further depleted by the extra fuel costs, the manufacturers figures, sort of lies, really.
This is called salesmanship, whatever the produce on offer, never been any different, neo-whatever or whatever, just words.
Caveat emptor is however not just words, must be studied and learnt, this is the times table of private enterprise.
We find that, after many decades at the joust, the safest method is to treat them all like a bunch of lying turds, as many are, the decent ones, realising the problem, don broad shoulders. Go back later and give them a cuddle.
Anyone managed to replicate the manufacturers fuel consumption figures for the Evoque yet?
Thought not.
19 October 2012 at 10:22 pm
The insincerity we are confronted with in all areas of public life is one of the most wearing features of our times. It isn’t merely when they’re stabbing one in the back; it’s when they’re smiling to one’s face. I had to walk out of a meeting with my bank because its representative had started to explain their “rewards” system. The idea of being “rewarded” for spending money was so ludicrous that I had to depart or collapse into giggles.
20 October 2012 at 9:15 am
“Wearing” is spot on, BenSix. The utter tedium of having to switch providers for everything every year. Like call centres, it’s the egregious consequence of corporate vastness. There’s no such thing as a loyal customer, only numbers in and out. One unhappy customer for a small business is a tragedy; a million unhappy customers for a corporate is a statistic.
20 October 2012 at 10:45 am
Yes, Brit, the psychological manipulation of the consumer is out of control. Purses and wallets are chock full of rewards cards or points cards, even for such minor things as greeting cards and coffees. My wife and I went to the States last summer to do some outlet clothes shopping and, while the prices were astoundingly low, everything was priced by complex formulas involving discounts on discounts, take-another-10 %-off, buy- two-get-one-free, etc., and the receipts and clerks always made a big fuss about how much we had “saved”, as if we had just made a desposit in a savings account. My wife thought I was a total killjoy when I suggested we start keeping track of how much we had spent rather than saved. A big part of modern marketing seems to be about trying to get gazillions of people to spend small amounts with low margins on the same thing, so it’s not surprising that one disgruntled customer is just an irritant to them, like post-sale service.
The tech industry seems to me to be one big scam. Whereas North American carmakers forties years ago designed their cars to start falling apart after about three years, with today’s computers, TVs, cellphones etc, everything lasts forever, but everything seems to need expensive extras and will be overtaken within the year by flashy new improved editions that require more extras and that are incompatible with everything you have. My teenaged son was on cloud nine with his new Blackberry that locked him in for three years, but within a year, thanks to Apple, he felt like a social geek. The fact that both had many more features than he could possibly want or need made not the slightest difference.
Still, I’m not sure how much all this has to do with the banks (although as long ago as ten years I remember feeling a sense of forboding at a bank advertisement directed at working women that said “Get the Loan You Deserve”) or whether Bryan’s righteous rage really justifies a wake for “neo-liberalism”, a telltale term of approbation for the market. A lot of leftist/progressives are screaming for more regulation while clearly having no idea what they want to regulate or how. It sounds a bit like more civil servants for the sake of more civil servants to me. I’m not sure either Adam Smith or Milton Friedman would have had much problem with enforcing criminal laws against theft and breach or trust or possibly even breaking them up.
20 October 2012 at 12:47 pm
If you can’t afford to pay the full price in cash, you can’t afford it. And if the full cash price isn’t stated then you are simply being offered a shockingly priced HP agreement in disguise. Love the idea that the crash “has not yet stripped the corporate con-artists out of the system”. Lol, they are the system these days. Shop local, buy plenty second-hand and nurture where you live is the future, I think. Westminster and the City don’t care: if they did, we’d be watching some perp walks instead of those adverts from payday loans outfits whose annual interest rates are in the thousands of per cent. They seem to be thought perfectly normal these days, which in a way they are. Being taken for 45 per cent on some byzantine loan deal does look a bargain compared to 4500 per cent on a sub at the end of the month.
20 October 2012 at 4:31 pm
Agree, Fish, with prescription, Fish. But maybe not the incurable thing. A conscienceless, amoral entity is psychotic so we have psychotic companies – there are drugs….
20 October 2012 at 6:33 pm
I’ve been resisting for years. Have cut my own hair sine 1969. Have one car, a 1990 toyota pruchased used in 2000. Haven’t bought new clothing since 1998. We shop thrifts first for nearly everything we need.
Hasn’t changed anything but the best causes are the ones you can never win.
Thanks for the post, and double thanks for naming the major culprit, Milton Friedman.