Please Hold...

Every generation like to talk about their own "good old days" and ours is no different. But one thing that I have to say my parents' generation had better than us was "customer service". I grew up in a house with a Mom who was very adept at dealing with customer service. If someone failed to give her what she paid for, she knew about it. And she would take her case to whatever level she had to in order to get satisfaction. We kids used to tease her about her "Poison Pen Letters", but when she talked, people listened. She was good at getting her money's worth, and then some. You didn't cheat Mom.

I don't think that level of customer care exists anymore. I remember one of the first signs of that was the so-called "Lemon Laws" for automobiles. Imagine, the government had to enact a law to force car manufacturers to deliver what the customer paid for. And I remember one time trying to get tech support from Microsoft relating to a faulty product they'd put out, and being told I had to pay for customer support. Seemed a little funny at the time, since I thought I purchased customer support when I bought the damned product.

That's not the case anymore. It used to be "caveat emptor"-buyer beware-but now it's "buyer be damned." It's almost as though the manufacturers and retailers are telling us that successful purchases of their products and services is a luck-of-the-draw process. Plumbers and electricians are notorious for ridiculous prices, building and home contractors are famous for signing the contracts and then never coming back. And tech-support is synonymous with hours of frustration.

And companies don't care anymore. Look at Dell, America Online and their outsourced customer service. English as a Second Language was something taught in this country to help immigrants assimilate into the culture, but now it's a fact of life because no one seems to speak it anymore.

But they don't have to care. What are the consequences of selling inferior products in this country? More sales. People accept bad service as the status quo, simple as that. Occasionally a company might lose and have to give a little money back, but, as a whole, there will be plenty of money piling in behind it. Microsoft basically says, "Our way, or the Highway" and the on-ramps are empty folks. America Online lies, flat-out, but their customers aren't the subscribers anymore, the advertisers are. And there's no shortage of ads on anything AOL. And the gasoline manufacturers can just keep raising prices, without good cause, and people will just keep buying it. Exxon says it doesn't worry about "Being Green" because they make more than enough money without doing so.(they admit that here, read it if you want)

It's what we live with now. People lie down and take it. The earnings of these sub-par companies prove that. Cannot argue with success, right?