Why is everything in consumer / American life so fucking shitty now - and companies literally just say 'oh bc profit margins' and we're now expected to swallow that and sympathize?
Why is everything in consumer / American life so fucking shitty now - and companies literally just say 'oh bc profit margins' and we're now expected to swallow that and sympathize?
like I went to taco bell and they didn't even have napkins out. they had the other stuff just no napkins, I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don't get napkins! so they can save $100 per quarter rather than provide the barest minimum quality of life features.
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My satellite TV (Sky TV ... UK) subscription ended recently and they would not give me any sort of deal to sign a new contract, Come black Friday they a spamming me by email and every type of advert for great deals for NEW Customers only!
I called SKY to cancel and they offered me a better deal but we're going to charge me an admin fee to sign a new contract, they wanted me to pay them to sign a contract with them!
I told them that it was not acceptable and cancel my service, having been put through to "my manager" they eventually waived the admin fee...
How has it come to this, I'm an easy customer, I am happy with the product, I'll sign a contract if it's a good deal, but they went out of their way to lose me
Because for every person like you that jumps through hops to get a new deal there are lots of people who just passivelly let the renewal happen under inferior conditions that they could have got if they tried.
That's also why they put stupid hindrances in your way: such things cause many people to give up and just go along with a suboptimal renewal, ergo they make more money from acting thus than they lose from clients who say "enough is enough" and drop them (notice how you did not drop them - they lost nothing from giving you the run around and could've gained if you had given up and renewed with the shit conditions: it's pretty much a can't-loose situation for them)
I lived in then UK for over a decade and one thing that stood out when I moved from the The Netherlands to the UK (already more than 15 years ago) and from the UK to Portugal is how much more the larger consumer-facing companies in the UK did the most that they could to take advantage of people's mistakes or laziness than in those other countries - I remember a particularly sleazy gym membership contract from Virgin were per-contract (I always read those things) the only way to cancel it before the yearly auto-renewal was to contact them during a specific week before renewal (2 weeks before end of contract if I remember it correctly), not before nor after.
Over the whole time I was there, a handful of the most outrageous abuses when it came to consumer contracts were plugged (the one I remember the best was the creation of a rental deposit insurance to stop tenants from losing their deposits at the end of the rental agreement, as before that landlords would often just keep it all for no reason and then the only option the tenant had was take it to Court) but the whole posture of taking advantage of costumer laziness and normal mistakes (auch as, forgetting a date for canceling and auto-renewal) was widespread in the UK compared to other countries I lived in.
As it so happens, people themselves were also to blame: I remember how amazed the rental agency guy was that I actually read the Rental Agreement and even demanded corrections before I signed anything - "Nobody reads these", he said - when even at the massive daily rate I was paid back then for my work it was still worth it to spend the 1 or 2 hours reading a contract were I was assuming a commiment of at least £15k (at the time a "reasonable" London rent for a year).
Me in your position would've just said "fuck this", cancelled SKY and gone without (and I have done it for some things were I felt the other side had abused my trust, such as closing my account with my first bank in the UK the one and only time I was charged an overdraft fee), mainly because my early adult years happenned mostly in The Netherlands so I have their style of demanding consumer rather than the more passive and willing to overlook these things style common it the UK.
It's better benefits for the next quarter. Farther away nobody seems to give a damn today.
Except when the vast majority of people will not "walk away" when they're shafted like this in the UK, shafting your costumers just keeps on working way beyond the next quarter. They only stop if a competitor pops up that doesn't shaft costumers and gets a significant market share from doing it, and only long enough to see away the threat or for said competitor, once established, starting to shaft costumers.
As the UK has a hugelly incestuous relation between top politicians and large companies and an anti-Corruption system designed not to work at all (lets just say the only Judicial entity allowed to investigate it in the whole country, has less budget that the smallest of city halls) there are tons of markets with high barriers to entry due to artificial "licensing" restrictions and the local Regulators are the weakest, most passive and even most often captured in all of Europe, so no politically connected company (or just large) will ever be made to stop such practices by regulators, hence it's up to consumers to force them to.
In over a decade in the UK, what I saw over the years was that kind of practice by companies not improving, and in some cases becoming worse, and people just kept on taking it and not walking away, with at best a passive agressive response
On the consumer side, you can see the behaviour I describe in how the previous poster responded to it: he/she went through the effort of jumping through hops to keep a subscription to pay TV, hardly something necessary in this day and age of Digital Over The Air TV with tons of channels and online streaming services and that's actually in the higher range of assertiveness when it comes to UK consumers, IMHO - most people just passivelly accept almost any crap from dominant companies.
IMHO it's both a consumer culture and a politicial problem, but even in an environment were the authorities couldn't care less, consumer behaviour could go a long way to change things at least in domains were it is a reasonable option to "do without" (so not things like internet connectivity or housing, but most definitelly something like Pay TV), only there is way too much passive acceptance of what would in my experience in The Netherlands, be seen as outrageous unnacceptable shit.
Yeah I know, sigh.
I'm trying to buy short route, bulk buy from local producers (meat etc) we'll see how that goes.
Absolutely terrible news bro I feel for you.