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

vol. 4,#20, November 30, 1998

THE CUSTOMER IS SOMETIMES WRONG

Do you all feel loved by big business? Because you are, you are. Not as employees, to be sure, but as consumers. If we have even the faintest hint of an unmet need, focus groups will discover it, manufacturers will create products to fill it and send personalized advertising for them to our door. To make sure our crowded schedules allow us to buy all this stuff, stores stay open round the clock. Better yet, they offer stuff by catalog or online so we don't even have to leave home to spend money. When we buy or order, we are always thanked for choosing that product, that store, that online vendor, that airline.

We have moved, unwittingly, into the age of "the customer is always right." Suddenly our ability to choose one product or store over another, or to stalk out and never return if we're dissatisfied, gives us enormous power.

The only problem with that flattering model of ourselves is that catering to us when we are NOT right, when we are even drastically in the wrong, has social consequences we have not fully examined.

You see, fireworks stores have customers who walk in with lit cigarettes. Libraries are frequented by busy parents who become so engrossed in their browsing they don't notice their kids are reprogramming the library's computers. Boutiques have customers who paw through dresses and silk blouses while licking ice cream cones, and cocktail lounges have drunken customers who get upset when refused another drink. Daycare centers have parents who don't pick up their kids by closing time. Every store, and every business, has customers who want the products and services ever faster, ever cheaper, anytime they want it.

If we accept and adapt to such casual rudeness, it costs us time and money. We have to stay overtime to wait for those late parents. Librarians spend time and money fixing the computers the kids bollixed up. Merchants have to eat the cost of damaged merchandise, and bartenders who cater to drunks risk violence or vomit.

That's bad enough. But we also send a signal that rudeness in customers is acceptable. And if we're told it's okay to behave that way as customers, it's easier for us to act that way with our friends and relations. This is not the way to world peace and harmony.

Having gotten used to the WalMart model of 24 hours a day service, every day of the year, we don't bother anymore to plan ahead for weekends and holidays, and may get indignant when we find the library is closed on Thanksgiving, or that we can't get a prescription refilled on Christmas day. When we go to convenience stores on a holiday or at 3 in the morning, we may be not so much grateful that they're open as irritated that they don't stock tarragon or virgin olive oil.

But the "faster, cheaper, and open all the time" imperative also has implications for us as workers. The faster we need to deliver, the likelier it is that our work gets mechanical, repetitive and deadening--until somebody simply creates a machine to do our job. What a choice: become more like a machine yourself or be replaced by one.

"Open all the time" also forces workers into inhuman schedules. People are compelled to work nights, fighting the natural rhythms of their bodies and their family life, working when they should be eating dinner, reading bedtime stories, making love, or sleeping. We are forced to leave homes and families on Christmas and Thanksgiving--bad enough for those who have the comfort of knowing their work saves lives, but worse for those who make that sacrifice in order to sell turkeys or lingerie or power tools.

As for cheaper, I hardly need to tell you that American workers are the most expensive component in any product. If there's any way an 8 year old in Thailand can do the work instead of us, we're history. And we're not just talking about manufacturing anymore, either. High tech companies are contracting technical manual writers in Ireland, and hiring programmers in India. When Bill Gates needs more programmers right here at home, he just phones Congress and asks for a bill allowing "emergency" immigration for trained technical people from India and the Philippines.

I wonder if we're even addressing the right side of the "we want it cheaper" equation. Instead of saying "Customers don't make enough money to buy basic goods and services, so we'll supply cheaper ones," we could say "Why AREN'T customers making enough money to afford basic goods and services?" and figure out how to fix a depressed wage and salary structure. Yes, in a global economy, that might be difficult, even impossible. But I find it strange that that question goes virtually unasked (at least by the usual experts on the News Hour).

The other problem is that we are using the consumer model where it is inappropriate. Many patients act more like customers, asking their doctors not for their medical judgment but for drugs and treatments they think will solve their problems. Parishioners are acting like consumers, choosing beliefs they like while rejecting those they find unduly constraining. Judging from our divorce rate, one might ask if we apply the consumer model to our mates as well--when they prove disappointing, we discard them and replace them with shinier newer models.

It especially bothers me that students are acting like customers, telling universities what they want to learn (and no more), some of them demanding that it be delivered directly to their homes by web or TV. After all, isn't a degree just another consumer product? If local universities won't provide online degrees, commercial vendors will--they are already doing so. Universities have been forced into the distance learning business before they've even had time to ask whether web or cable courses CAN deliver the same quality of learning that face-to-face contact with professors and other students can. When the train is leaving the station, the temptation is to run and catch it, and ask later whether it's going in the direction you planned to go.

That's why universities need to ask themselves if their business is education or granting degrees. If they decide that what they're all about is education, which is to say teaching people how through the ages humanity has learned ways of becoming fully human, what will they do about customers who say "I don't WANT to be fully human, I want to be an accountant"? To avoid losing these students, will universities dumb down the curriculum?

Or will they persist in believing in the value of what they teach, and continue to ask students to read and think about great ideas and great works of imagination, and to understand how our ideas and institutions evolved? In a world ruled by incomprehensible technology will they insist that students understand both science and ethics, so that as citizens they can decide whether we SHOULD do everything our science and technology allow us to do?

But if universities decide that the consumer model is correct, and that the customer is always right, they will need to think about how to distinguish themselves from competing brands of education. In the diploma mill business, cheaper and faster is the model that sells.

"The customer is always right", like 2-digit dates, has become dangerously embedded in way too many complex systems and worse yet, in our thinking. Before we go any farther down this path, perhaps we should start asking what the system effects will be. But then, that's what I'm here for, right?

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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