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American culture is optimized for consumers. When you're a consumer, it's a great thing: customer service, return policies, payment methods, and the entire proc
by ceilingcorner 6y ago
American culture is optimized for consumers. When you're a consumer, it's a great thing: customer service, return policies, payment methods, and the entire process of buying stuff is leaps and bounds above somewhere like the European Union.
When you're a worker, though, no one particularly cares about you. If a CEO can squeeze more profit out of his workforce by forcing them to work odd hours at the drop of a hat, he's celebrated for it.
We really need to shift this balance in the opposite direction.
- pklausler 6y agoWhere are you getting this great customer service? I'd like to get in on some of that.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoAmerican customer service is leaps and bounds above anything you get in Europe. And I don't mean restaurant service. Europe as a whole is much more worker-first than customer-first.
- danaris 6y agoI guess one might have to do some definition of terms here. Is "customer service" where a customer gets to call/walk in and talk to a human who genuinely tries to help them solve their problems, or where a customer gets to call/walk in and treat someone like absolute shit in order to feel better about their problems? 'Cause "customer service" in the US is all too often used to mean the latter.
- asiando 6y agoService itself is pretty good compared to the EU. Consumer protection for goods however isn’t. Most products in the EU must come with a 2-year consumer warranty for example.
- dimatura 6y agoI sympathize with these workers. But if this can be seen an indictment of American culture, then all in all, maybe things aren't so bad. I worked a construction job for a summer in Chile where we had 12-hour shifts, 5 days a week, and every week we alternated between day (8am-8pm) and night (8pm-8am) shifts. And I had it easy, because I lived close to the site - a lot of the other workers had 1+ hour commutes each way.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoExcept America, the most dominate economic power in the history of the world, should be compared with other first-world developed countries, not Chile. Having the American middle class move backwards is not exactly an accomplishment.
- dimatura 6y agoYeah, I agree. Hopefully labor conditions can improve in the rest of the world as well.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago> customer service, return policies, payment methods, and the entire process of buying stuff is leaps and bounds above somewhere like the European Union. Nonsense. Buying stuff is just as easy here as in the US and my experience of return policies is that they are more generous here. Plus you have a much longer legally enforced warranties. What payment methods do you have in the US that we don't? Apart from cheques that is.
- dingaling 6y agoI'm constantly amazed how photographer colleagues in the USA order three lenses at the same time, evaluate them for copy variation and send two of them back. That's simply not possible in the UK for example.
- kwhitefoot 6y agoI'm not a photographer so please excuse what is probably a naïve question: why would the lenses vary so much? Does it mean that photographers in the UK have only a one in three chance of getting a good lens each time they buy? If the quality is so variable wouldn't this generate a bad reputation and thus reduce the sales of the brands that were poor and increase the sales of those that were better?
- tomduncalf 6y ago> That's simply not possible in the UK for example. I’m pretty sure it is? Online sales have a mandatory 14 day return policy, unless there’s some exception that prevents doing the specific thing you describe
- SerLava 6y agoIt's not optimized for consumers. It's optimized for the c-suite.
- quantified 6y agoMore towards both of them. Away from employees and problematic for merchants too from what I read.
- Aardwolf 6y ago> customer service Until you want to cancel your service, I suppose?