Once I suggested to a grocery store manager that customers who scan, bag, and tally their orders should get a 5 percent discount. I got no response, but why should’nt self-service get a better price, at the grocery store and everywhere else? From John Maxwell Hamilton at realclearwire.com:
Has it dawned on you that you work for everyone who is supposed to work for you? Have you noticed it is a lonely job?
You work for your bank, which pushes you to spend a long time navigating its automated telephone system after the announcement, “We have installed new features to better serve you.”
You work for your service repair companies. A friend recounts her hurdles getting Sears to fix an ailing refrigerator under warranty. After many telephone disconnects, an email said a technician would be out the following Saturday between 8 and 5. At 4:30 that afternoon a new message announced, without explanation, the appointment would be rescheduled. No one called to ask what was best for her schedule.
You work for your preferred airline (or any airline), which wants you to use its website to solve a computer screw-up to your upcoming ticket. When you call Delta, an automated voice urges you to send a text before it puts you on hold for an agent.
Then there is the discount travel company, Priceline, which recently sent me a customer service telephone number that did not have enough digits to be useful.
I use those companies as examples, but this phenomenon is ubiquitous.
The drive to put us to work for the companies that are supposed to work for us may be efficient for them. It’s often the opposite for us. That’s not all, though. The experience touches on one of the pressing issues of our time: our growing feelings of alienation.
A friend of mine was asked recently by a floor manager at Walmart if she wished to use the auto check-out. She replied that she didn’t work for Walmart. The floor manager’s response was “Good for you!”