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Runaway evolutionary arms races create some of the most interesting life forms we share the planet with. You know how it goes: one creature develops spikes, so another becomes armored, one produces poison, so the other builds immunity, and on and on it goes.
The thing about arms races, though, is that nobody ever really “wins.” The participants just spin off into an endless series of measures and countermeasures until some external catastrophe wipes out one or both competitors.
In an ideal world, businesses and the customers they are supposed to be serving would not be locked in such a destructive feedback cycle. A for-profit venture can provide value without screwing anyone over, and a customer can pay a fair price for a good or service without stealing the towels before checkout.
Optimistic possibilities aside, it seems we are moving more in the direction of an evolutionary arms race between profit-seeking ventures and consumers in the American economy. Though this sort of scenario might work out under the brutal law of tooth and claw in nature, it is kind of lose-lose as a way to organize a society.
Examples of businesses exploiting their customers, employees, and communities are so numerous that it is hard to pick just a few. Perhaps the most salient recent example is a report that found more than half of recent inflation is due to so-called “greedflation” — companies increasing their prices or keeping them high even after price pressures in their own supply chains have slackened so that they can dramatically increase profits upon the backs of consumers.
Profits do always have some role in price growth. However, according to this report, corporate profits were about five times more influential in driving inflation during last year’s second and third quarters than they were in the 40 years before the pandemic.
Competition — the marketplace — is supposed to stem this sort of thing. Consumers’ traditional weapon against corporate greed is choice. However, when all companies are keeping their prices high … or making you talk to some unhelpful AI for 20 minutes before getting anywhere on a customer service call … or producing equivalent products with similarly annoying flaws, there is nowhere for consumers to go.
Even as businesses continue to find novel ways to hose their customers, in at least some instances, consumers strike back in more creative ways than simply voting with their wallets. My favorite in recent memory: restaurant goers literally eating into Red Lobster’s parent company’s profits to the tune of $11 million by enthusiastically taking advantage of the $20 “Ultimate Endless Shrimp” promotion. (“Hey, George, the ocean called. They’re running out of shrimp.”)
I don’t blame the companies for certain of the letdowns. Businesses must defend themselves against the scourge of any retail establishment: the whiny Karen customer (and no, we’re not canceling the term “Karen” yet, it works for what it means, and as someone whose shortened first name has been used colloquially for decades to refer to one who utilizes the services of prostitutes, I don’t have much sympathy).
Anyone who has had the experience of directly interacting with essentially random segments of the public can tell you that the customer absolutely is not always right. In fact, something like one out of every 20 customers (it could be more or less depending on a lot of factors) is an absolute nightmare.
Businesses need things like convoluted mazes which must be solved in order to reach an actual customer service human because this helps filter out the impatient and the unskilled — otherwise they would be overwhelmed by the small minority of particularly demanding customers. Unfortunately, methods like this end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater, because many perfectly reasonable customers with perfectly reasonable complaints also get disgusted and give up.
Until nearly every member of our society can self-assess effectively enough to determine whether they themselves are the problem — unlikely, look at a few of those January 6 defendants lately — all of us will be stuck with a steadily worsening customer experience.
Of course, while it doesn’t happen in nature, there is a way to end an arms race between rational beings: both sides simultaneously lay down their weapons and go home. Barring that, perhaps we’ll get hit by a giant asteroid in the near future and won’t have to worry about it.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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