I find it interesting to ponder on how corporations have tapped into our desire to have a choice and, increasingly over the past few decades are getting us to do work that was traditionally not done by us, so they can earn more profit.
The supermarket is the obvious example.
Rather than handing a list of what groceries we need for the week to a shopkeeper who gets them from his storeroom out the back and then delivers them to us, as happened many decades ago – bread, milk, papers, coal/blocks and the weekly groceries were, or could all be delivered to our home when I was young – big business has tapped into our desire for choice to the extent that we are convinced that we are better off not only doing all the above ourselves, but also managing our money with no human contact, assembling our own furniture, filling our own petrol and doing several other tasks that we weren’t doing decades ago.
Another example is, of course, the automatic answering sequence. Rather than employing telephonists to interact human to human, we hear a series of instructions and we do the work, and put up with the frustration when we dial a wrong digit in a series of 8 or 10 digits and have to start all over again. And getting back to the weekly shopping, I bet no-one would be able to figure out the vast profits that supermarkets make by having bar-codes (where customers have to compare prices, weights and volumes, and then calculate accordingly, to see which item is better value) instead of individually priced items that was the norm up to 30 or so years ago.
And there are loads of other examples which you can have endless hours of fun trying to think of. But they are all very light and in a way, annoying manifestations of corporate closed-ness.
And anyway there are advantages for us consumers. We can now eat tikka masala and pepperoni pizzas as well as spuds and porridge because we have a huge variety of foods from which to choose, from all over the world. We can keep our money safe in banks and withdraw small amounts from a hole in the wall in a far-off country instead of queuing for travellers’ cheques and worrying about carrying large amounts of cash around.
I can bring this laptop almost anywhere in the world and it will work as well as it does at home. We can zap our groceries through an automatic machine with the bar-code obligingly totting up each item quickly. And we can buy stuff on line.
(But no —– I can’t think of any benefits arising from the automatic answering machines)!
I don’t really want to turn back the clock. I enjoy the fruits of modernity as much as anyone else. And anyway advocating that social or technological advances are halted just to maintain some sort of traditional status quo which might be more human scale (there’s that term again) is well-nigh impossible.
But the reason I mention it is that it’s important to remember that the corporate world gains a lot more than the individual consumer from all the above.
In the next post I will discuss the impact of corporate closed-ness in respect of how it does real harm to our society – and in particular those who are struggling.