[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img] Dear American Businesses,
You continue to disappoint me. Instead of continued innovation, creativity and choice, it seems you have nothing to offer but stuff I don’t want at prices I don’t want to pay. Last week’s dilemma illustrates one of my problems by your kind.
I wanted to do a very simple thing: Buy an airline ticket from Los Angeles to New York City. With a seemingly vast world of options (or at least expedia.com makes it look that way with lots of blinking graphics) and a reasonable budget, it seems as if this would have been easy. Of course, it wasn’t. Instead, it was an exercise in picking the least terrible choice – exactly like voting for President. Here were my choices:
Option 1: Buying a ticket on an airline with comfortable (coach) seats that would take off and land on time. The only problem – the airline had already sold all the seats. To buy a ticket would be to take a ride on the oversubscribed wagon, where everyone hopes someone fails to show. Otherwise there’s a lot of nail-biting at the gate while we all hope some person is willing to take a later flight along with a voucher. If no one steps up, then it’s a Lord of the Flies moment. Someone gets left behind. And for someone about to take a sleeping pill before getting on a red-eye – that wasn’t at all a good idea.
Option 2: Buying a ticket on a legacy airline. Likely to take off and land on time, but only center seats in the back available. Can we say, “no recline?” Combine that with a ridiculously high price, and it was a no go.
Option 3: Buying a ticket on a discount airline flying out of Burbank – a smaller airport with a lot less problems. Lots of comfortable (for an extra charge) seats available. But the first and only time I went the “discount” route, I was stuck on the tarmac at JFK for hours – a ridiculously common occurrence on this particular airline.
Many Choices? Huh!
For seven hundred and fifty dollars, none of these options sounded attractive. Throwing more money at the decision would not make it any better. I held my nose and bought a ticket. (In the end, I was only stuck on the tarmac for ninety minutes).
The beauty of capitalism and America, you continually espouse, is that it’s a world of unlimited choice. The world (of products, at least) is our oyster. If I want it, you can sell it. Maybe I’m not looking in the right place, but you never seem to provide enough choices for me.
Take for example, my recent decision to (try to) avoid items made in China. Everything I’ve come across from you the last month has been made in China (or Taiwan, or Hong Kong, — again, China or Sri Lanka and India). Want goods manufactured in a first world country by people who have healthcare, or at least in our country, have emergency room access? It’s a no-go. Many of my friends discussed bans or boycotts on goods made with low-paid labor. For most of us, it’s been an exercise in futility. Unless one can get a local artisan or manufacturer to make something for you, it’s nearly impossible. If there is consumer demand for these items, why don’t you make them? It’s supposed to be a supply-and-demand world, after all.
Food Problems Will Make You Choke
In my circle of acquaintances who are interested in real food that is not factory farmed, or genetically modified, the scarcity is the same. I can’t tell you how many times some local food treasure has been sourced only to rush out to find it sold out. Leaf lard is the best example. Twenty miles and thirty minutes of quality freeway time later, I and the others who’d heard it was in stock were out of luck. The proprietor of this particular American business had no sense of when a new shipment would arrive. The number of blogs dedicated to the pursuit of real food is mind-boggling. Instead of a celebration of the food we crave, most posts are about chasing obscure sources – and those should be plentiful, given the demand, right?
Then there is the popular product that you innovatively produce and then dump (and with it all support). Just last year everyone I know bought one of the Flip video cameras; great high definition film quality, small camera, and best of all, small price. I thought it so great that I bought two, one as a gift . . . the day before Cisco announced it was shutting down the Flip business it had recently purchased. Profitable (a state many of you claim to want to reach and maintain) was not profitable enough. Adding insult to injury, Netflix, which I always thought an ingenious idea, is cannibalizing its own business, on purpose. The current mode of operations appears to be: Raise the price, don’t provide much content and then turn the core business of DVD rentals into the bastard step-child. Again, it’s the case of not enough profit.
George W. Bush urged us to go out and spend our hard-earned dollars on your products. Our current President and his administration have been more reserved, but the message is still the same. We’re a consumer economy, we should consume what you have to offer. But every time I hear that, I look at the piles of “obsolete” goods I already have and wonder why I should invest in anything new. As I was writing this essay, Hewlett Packard announced it was spinning off the computer division. Of course, I have a new one of those too . . . .
I’d love to support you, but you continue to raise prices, outsource everything but marketing, and refuse to give us what we want. I’m going to try to save my money and hope for a brighter future. You, you’re going to have to make it on your own.
Sincerely,
The disgruntled American consumer
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
