A Look Back at Lessons of the Last Decade
It’s time to take stock of a decade of Consumer Affairs columns, if only because it’s not polite just to walk off without saying anything. After 10 years on it, I’m going to other assignments for awhile.
When I started the column, writing on business for consumers, most still found business mysterious and suspect. It was only somewhat demystified by a decade of scandal and business failure, and now it’s being re -mystified. All else having failed, business is suddenly our salvation and business executives our heroes.
The decade’s columns are full of refrains. “What goes around comes around” may have less to do with just desserts than with history repeating itself. Human nature doesn’t change. Business will be business, conducted the same way since two camels met at a desert crossroads.
The first column (and four later) was on “collision damage waivers”--special insurance thrust on rental car customers. A poor buy, deceptively sold and excessively profitable, they’ve been attacked by insurance commissioners, attorneys general and consumer advocates. But they’re still an issue, still adding $7 to $15 a day, needed or not, to rental costs.
Interest on credit cards (25 columns) just keeps going up or down a few points, often because of some legislative threat. Worse, card issuers stick to an incomprehensible system of applying finance charges--something like adding together three or four months’ average daily balances and all cash advances drawn on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and dividing by the number of letters in your mother’s maiden name. No one gets it, so consumer debt keeps soaring.
The Internal Revenue Service (26 columns) will never stop saying it only wants to help the taxpayer--to simplify instructions, shorten forms, make payment deals. It will keep urging illegal workers and even criminals to pay taxes, claiming that it doesn’t care how the money was earned and never shares information with other agencies. Everyone just laughs. No faith.
The word “sale” (nine columns) still means only that something’s offered for sale, “wholesale to the public” is still just retail, and “70% Off” is still absolutely meaningless. But they’ll always be good come-ons--testament not to the greed of consumers, as some mean spirits say, but to their undying innocence.
Auto sales and service (13 columns) continually draw the most consumer complaints. The bizarre negotiation into which car buyers are forced and the desperation of car owners seeking effective repairs can’t be blamed wholly on foreign competition, unfair regulations or the independent dealer system. There’s also industry tradition, total denial and a short-sighted drive for profit.
Consumer protectors keep chipping away at Sears (five columns)--its sales, its pricing, its service, its auto repairs. It may be no worse than other retailers. But it’s fair game, it’s big game, and it takes time to make a dinosaur roll over.
Telephone charges and services (26 columns) have confused and angered customers since divestiture, when phone companies first became real businesses, supposedly competing to sell products such as touch tone, inside wiring, 800 and 900 service. The more services they sell and the more businesses they get into, the more complaints there’ll be. Don’t expect normal business practices from companies whose business is guaranteed.
Insurance (nine columns) may always be mysterious to consumers, who can’t understand the terms enough to really comparison shop, usually over-insure, and are startled when they turn out not to be covered for something at all. But what change is possible in a business literally selling promises, with a sideline in uninterpretable statistics?
Corporations keep pursuing the secret of good customer service (five columns) through consultants, market research and weighty seminars on “service-driven marketing.” Meantime, their customers go elsewhere, or call reporters to complain that no one says “please” or “sorry” any more, and no one offers help when it’s needed. This isn’t such hard stuff.
Some things do change, constantly. Frauds, for example: Mail-order fraud is out; telemarketing scams are in. And fads: Nonviolence and sensitivity are out; environment and health are in.
Even consumers change. Sometimes they just get used to what they were protesting. Banks, for instance (23 columns), said customers would eventually accept all their new fees and teller machines. Unable to avoid them, everyone did.
Consumers also protest more effectively--a self-reliance learned in the relatively unregulated ‘80s. Some got too savvy, too grasping--samurai consumers, pushing the press to publicize their cases, stretching those cases beyond reason. Their “lemons” register 140,000 miles, their contracts were knowingly signed, their taxes indisputably due.
But many consumers are truly wiser. They shop better, buy better and check their accounts. They register appreciation and dissatisfaction. They get names and numbers and they use them--including ours.
