Sorry, but the Economy Is No Longer in Service
“Who are you gonna believe,” Groucho Marx quipped, “me or your own eyes?” This old line from the movie “Duck Soup” always comes to mind when I read about productivity in the American workplace. The way the Marx brothers of our economy tell it, everything good about the nation can be measured in the perpetual, incremental and essential gains in worker efficiency -- that is, our ability to produce more in less time by fewer of us.
Didn’t Alan Greenspan just say it was the bright spot in all the gloom?
My own eyes see the matter differently, quite differently in fact. A good share of what’s bad and getting worse about the age in which we live can be traced to the whip-cracking, heartless -- and now laughably counterproductive -- demand that everyone be more productive, no matter what the cost. At least eight out of 10 people I know feel exactly the same way, and the other two aren’t the kind who will indulge in such topics.
You have to wonder, don’t economists spend at least some time in the real world too?
For instance, my new telephone directory arrived. I set out to find a newly published memoir that had been recommended to me. Odd, but four of five of the nearest bookstores are not listed in the Yellow Pages.
This is efficiency at work. Because the missing bookstores are owned by chains, and because chains are the essence of efficiency, bean counters at headquarters have consolidated contracts for telephone services. Naturally, that means that my neighborhood bookstore managers must forward matters to the executive offices in New York, where Southern California is regarded as an indecipherable mess -- never mind that it’s the No. 1 book-buying market in the country.
Rather than taking the time (time being the enemy of efficiency) to fill out and return the form that would have the Long Beach store listed in the Long Beach directory and the Lakewood store listed in Lakewood, the bookstore headquarters do what? Apparently nothing.
Result: 80% of my local stores do not get listed in the Yellow Pages, but who cares anyway because they’re in suburban Southern California, and you know what that means.
“I’ve been on my supervisor for years about this,” the manager of a store down the street told me. “We’ve found ourselves not even listed in directory assistance either. People get so mad because they know we’re here and they can’t call.”
My telephone company, also headquartered in New York, is no help in the matter. This merged behemoth of several companies has a motto about “making progress every day,” but I note that it cleverly does not say in which direction. A spokesman explained that without a proper form to scan into a computer, there is no way of determining whether a bookseller should be listed in the category “books.” So, for the sake of efficiency, it’s presumed that the store prefers not to appear in the Yellow Pages.
“I’ve lived here 44 years, and I’ve noticed the problem for some time now. But it’s much worse lately,” Lakewood Mayor Larry Van Nostran told me. The two bookstores in his city have gone unlisted, down from only one missing in last year’s telephone books. “It’s grossly unfair to entrepreneurs here who don’t get listed while competitors outside the area do.”
Some friends say I’m wasting my time with the old-fashioned phone book anyway. Heave it, they say, and embrace the efficiency of the future.
OK, I’ll go online. Using what is supposed to be the world’s largest Internet Yellow Pages, I click through three tedious Web pages and get an 800 number for the bookstore chain. Calling, I talk my way past one voice recognition machine to reach another. Prompted to give the intersection of the desired bookstore, the machine mistakes Westminster Avenue as Packet Avenue and repeatedly misunderstands Pacific Coast Highway. I respond to a total of 22 machine-generated questions. Now I have my number.
A clerk at the store, untrained and overworked but no doubt efficiently economical, narrows my search. The store computer shows one copy of Jim Harrison’s new memoir on hand. But the clerk cannot find it on the shelves.
To heck with this. I get in the car. The book is stacked six high on the “new releases” table at the front entrance. Efficiency? You figure it out, Groucho.
