My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3 #23, December 8, 1997

TO SERVE YOU BETTER

A while back, I biked out to my Target store to find an empty parking lot and a sign on the door saying that, "to serve me better," they had moved to the farthermost outskirts of town, out near Interstate 80. Indeed, more and more of our town is picking up and moving. Our town was built along the banks of the Mississippi River, but at this rate, a casual visitor might think the town was built around I-80. For our convenience, of course. Or maybe for the convenience of people traveling from Omaha to Philadelphia who suddenly remember they need to buy pantyhose or a printer cartridge.

I have come to believe that "to serve you better," and "for your convenience" are among the great lies of business, along with "the check is in the mail." Because, if they truly wanted to serve me better, don't you think they might have asked me what I wanted?

The tomato growers in California never asked me what I wanted in a tomato. If they had, I would not have answered "the ability to withstand a drop from waist height to the floor without so much as picking up a dent," a quality they have genetically engineered into their tomatoes. What I look for in tomatoes is flavor, not muscle tone. (Consider that a dropped tomato is traveling at 5 miles an hour. And that automobile bumpers are required by federal law to withstand crashes at 5 miles an hour without crumpling. Would it not pay us to strap California tomatoes to our bumpers?)

To serve us better the genetic engineers have also come up with bovine growth hormone to allow cows to quadruple their output of milk. Now, have you noticed any acute shortage of cows? Or dairy products? Were you not, in fact, under the impression that there is such an excess quantity of milk, butter and cheese that our government is spending lots of our money buying the surplus to maintain price levels?

Another way industry is serving us better is by making the things we own obsolete so that we have to replace them all. Remember vinyl records, which were replaced by tapes, which were replaced by CDs? Remember Betamax? And now apparently our VCRs are also going to become obsolete, replaced by DVD players. Wunderbar. Notice how you have to keep trading up on your computer and your software, even if you're reasonably happy with what you had? But if you don't trade up, eventually nothing will be compatible with your machine. (I think of this demonic scheme as the techno-economic imperative.)

Speaking of CDs, another way industry is serving us better is packaging. It was the Tylenol scare that did it. Ever since then, our packages have been tamperproof. Our pills are so thoroughly tamperproofed and childproofed I have on occasion had to use pliers to open them up. All our products are so much safer now--milk, juice, peanut butter, CDs...

Yep, there's no way anybody is going to sneak poison into our CDs, because they are unopenable. They are shrink-wrapped so tightly that you have to poke small sharp objects into the sealed edges and pry them up and hope they'll tear. And they will tear---one itty-bitty little strip at a time. After you've torn off several of these teeny strips, and you finally get your finger in there and tear the rest of the shrinkwrap off, you try to open the box. But you can't, because there's a neat little strip of printed adhesive tape sealing one side of it, and guess what? It doesn't want to come off in one smooth strip either. So you tear and you curse, and tear and curse, until finally you gain access to your CD. Now I at least have long fingernails. What on earth do GUYS do with shrinkwrapped CDs? And why do they put up with this nonsense?

And let us not forget voice mail, a device to serve us better because it is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. When I wanted to upgrade my mail-order computer, I called the company to find out what parts I needed to order. A machine greeted me and told me which buttons to push for what services. I punched the button for technical support and got a cheerful little ditty that was a cross between "The Little Drummer Boy" and "The Rite of Spring." Another mechanical voice gave me another menu of buttons to push, I punched the button for tech support, and the music played again. Yet another mechanical voice offered me a series of options, and I pushed my button. More little drummer boy. AT LAST the phone rang through to a voice that told me a technical support person would be with me at the next available opportunity. In the meantime, the little drummer boy from hell returned. Then a mechanical voice told me all technicians were busy, would I call again later. And it hung up on me. I called this company 58 times and went through this same exact sequence (the tune never once changing--I could score it for you by this point) before I finally got an actual live tech support guy. (I was so startled I nearly hung up.) Suffice it to say that when I saw their ads on TV proudly claiming: "We get 25,000 calls a week!" my reaction was, "Right. All from two customers trying to reach technical support."

The moral of this story is, when anyone tells you they're going to do something to serve you better, duck. Sure as shooting they've either put it where you can't get to it, bred it so it tastes like plastic, wrapped it so you can't get into it, or arranged for you to spend all eternity on hold waiting for it.