the awful corporatist future that we're heading towards

this weekend provided me with a great example of the extreme difference between the service you get from an enormous corporation and a small business. our society is barreling down the road toward a future comprised only of gigantic corporations. it is possible for a well-run corporation to provide good customer service -- if the corporation makes that its goal. in my personal experience, apple has made customer service a priority, but a quick google search will reveal that many others have had the same horrible giant-corporation service experience that I have had.

people in my parents' generation have noted the effects of increasing corporatism in our society, but i don't think it's well understood that the sheer size of giant corporations guarantee the impossibility of customer service, at least in the sense that my parents grew up with. my two stories from this weekend will illustrate what I mean.

on Sunday, I went for a bike ride. 25 miles from home, my shifting cable broke. this meant that my bike was reduced from 30 gears to 3, and as a bonus, they were the three hardest gears. this meant, in my hilly home, i was basically stranded. i probably could have biked home over the hills in the hard gears, but i very likely would have injured my knees.

like an idiot, i had no money on my person. still, i took a chance and rode an extra 3 miles to a bike shop. i walked in, explained to the mechanic that i had no money but did have a broken cable. he was already working on a bike. he took it off the rack, put mine on the rack, replaced the broken parts, and fixed my bike. he told me i could pay when i got home. we'd never met before, i had never bought anything at that bike shop. i rode home on my perfectly fixed bike, showered, then brought my money and my bike back to the shop. i paid for the repairs and gave them my bike to perform additional expensive, non-emergency maintenance.

the bike mechanic (who was not the store owner, and did not ask anybody for permission for extending me credit) treated me like a human being and took a risk on me. like a good member of society, i rewarded this shop with my business.

starting last Monday, our home internet was failing for 1-2 hours every night, beginning at 9PM. it was entirely predictable and repeatable. on Thursday we called Comcast and reported the outage, while it was in progress. they acknowledged the outage, said they didn't know the cause, and scheduled a technician visit for Saturday morning. the technician arrived on Saturday and said he had no idea what the problem was, and that he could not see it. of course he could not see it, we said, because it happens at night. Comcast will not send a technician at 9PM. we confirmed with the technician that there was no way for them to put a technician at our location when the problem was happening.

he said we had a very old modem, which is true, but he also said it was extremely unlikely that the very old modem would cause a scheduled outage. he also said some of our coax wiring was faulty, which also was not the cause of the problem. he rewired the house anyway, to satisfy some urge of his own. he apologized for not seeing the problem, and left. that night, at the regularly scheduled time, the internet went out. we spoke to 4 different Comcast service reps, and each one told us a different thing. one claimed that he could not fix our outage because our very old modem was not supported by his database. this didn't seem to present a problem for the subsequent technician. one tech asked for my social security number, the other three did not.

after a lot of frustration, Comcast reset something, and our service was restored -- for another 24 hours. the problem occurred, as scheduled, Sunday night. We expect it to return tonight. We have a new modem that will arrive on Tuesday, not because we have any great need for a new modem, but because until we have a new modem, Comcast will keep blaming our "unsupported" modem for the problem. When our internet goes out Tuesday night, with our shiney new "supported" modem, what options will we have? They won't send a technician at the time the problem occurs, and when the problem is not occurring, there's nothing for the technician to see. So we're stuck.

Now, out of the 6 Comcast personnel we've talked with in the last week, 5 of them were very nice, and as helpful as they possibly could have been. But not a goddamn one of them spoke to any of the others. Nobody properly took notes on our problem, and nobody read the notes. They didn't even have a proper standard procedure for dealing with customers (social security number? why?). They did useless, unasked-for repairs. They blamed my hardware for the problem, and offered absolutely no plan for resolving this problem. In the end, we may have no choice but to take our business elsewhere.

Unfortunately, as a gigantic corporation, Comcast is able to buy up all the bandwidth in a region and squash small startups. This is "capitalism" according to some. What it means in practice is that a customer of Comcast may expect overall entirely incompetent "service" from the company, while each individual person may actually be very pleasant. The problem is that the corporation is so huge, decentralized, and isolated from its actual infrastructure and customers that communication -- and thus competent problem resolution -- is not possible. It is possible to solve common "we've seen that a million times before" problems. But real debugging of complex problems, in a timely fashion that would actually satisfy customers, is entirely impossible.

It is the very size of the company that causes this problem. It is why I quit Bank Of America after being a customer for a decade and a half. BofA is "too big to fail" and they're also "too big to be competent".

The constant, cancerous growth of corporations into giant corporations is going to make our future a nightmare. Imagine a future where all bike shops are organized like Comcast or BofA. when my shifter cable snaps, I have to make an appointment for between 8am and 12am, and the technician says he's not sure what the problem is but he's going to replace my handlebar wraps because that can't hurt. where every time I call "customer care" to ask them to fix my shifter cable, I have to explain from the beginning what happened, and they tell me that my shifters are unsupported and I need to purchase a whole new bicycle. Imagine that this is the only bike shop within 10,000 miles.

this is where we are heading. the notion that "capitalism" means unchecked growth and consolidation fails totally to consider the unpleasant consequences. it is simply untrue that gigantic corporations can be dealt with like the small businesses in my parents' memories. when BofA "accidentally" arranges the order of your transactions so that you incur a major fee, there is no person you can talk with who gives a shit. when Verizon charges you a thousand bucks in overage fees because you forgot to turn off your phone before checking it to Australia, who is going to help you out? you signed away your rights as a human being when you entered your contract with them.

there are solutions to these problems. capitalist solutions, in fact, as jefferson and washington understood capitalism. the sort of capitalism that was destroyed by the railroads and our first American monopolies.

infrastructure is owned by the people. the highways and freeways of the USA are publicly owned (or used to be). the same for bridges, waterways, airwaves, and aquifers (again, used to be). the infrastructure is licensed to companies which can then compete on quality of product and service. there are no monopolies, no duopolies, no false competition like we have between the 3 mobile carriers or 2 internet providers that americans can "choose" between.

i have roughly 30 bike shops within 20 miles that I can choose from. i don't need scare quotes around the word. i can truly choose. and as a middle class person with a reasonable wage, my choice can actually be based on something other than price. i don't have to choose the closest, cheapest bike shop. i can choose one that provides the best service. and in this way, i can promote good service.

poor people don't have this luxury. they must choose based on price. and thus, a growing pool of poor people promotes cheap service, not good service.

this is the crucial broken part of our "capitalist" system. as more and more people become poor, as more and more of our collective national wealth, resources, and infrastructure are handed over to the Comcasts and ATTs and BofAs of the world, there are fewer people who are able to promote good service with the tools of capitalism. As the giants grow and consolidate, as competition is killed before it can get a foothold, the giants have less incentive to provide service. soon, good service is a forgotten memory, with nobody wealthy enough to demand it, and nobody left to provide it.

that is where we are heading. until we start caring, large scale, about living in a society and stop pretending that we're all isolated islands of total self-sufficiency, we'll keep sliding into the united states of comcast.