Good Business, Bad Business, Who Knows?

Even if I wanted to use GPT or AI to write this post, it wouldn’t have worked out. I ran a few ideas through it just to see how it would play out and it didn’t capture what I wanted to share with you. No AI, so here goes.

I recently went on a cruise to Florida and Bimini. It was a short four-night experience with one of the well-regarded brands. I’d say, this was really a first for me because the last time I was on a cruise was when I first got married and it was on Celebrity, so very different. While I have a lot to write about the cruise itself, the purpose of my post today is about how business has changed so dramatically that consumers, customers and clients are now treated as commodities. The generification of people into automatons that represent some number of value per transaction. It’s disgusting and we have allowed it. Now we lean into because it feels normal.

I’ll seek to chunk this out to a few posts over time because there are just way too many topics on this. The digital age promised us unparalleled convenience and efficiency, yet many consumers find themselves entangled in a web of corporate processes that systematically devalue their most finite and precious resource: time. Additionally, there is no accountability for how companies waste our time and nickel and dime us for every transaction.

I’ll call out the obvious for people who will attack my lack of knowledge on this subject. In a few conversations about this, I’ve been called “Boomer” which I am not but, it to them it means I am old and stupid. I am not with the times. I think it means they never knew what good customer experience and service is or was. Maybe they don’t know what the world felt like with less of knowing all the things.

So, here I am in Miami, it has been a very long time. I grew up going there every year to see my grandparents. Miami is literally nothing like it was since the last time I was there. We stayed downtown and aside from all the construction, it was very nice. It felt like a different country. One thing I noticed right away was all the taxes on everything. Tourism taxes, and whatever else they could make up. We took an Uber and they charged us more for driving on a specific street. When we had anything in a restaurant, they automatically charged a gratuity. Now, I am going to say, sure, I get that if we are over a party of six or something that it is common practice to charge someone a gratuity. It has certainly been this way for all the years but now gratuity added on automatically for whatever? Yeah, I know, it seems like it has been this way and I am out of touch. Look, if you want to raise your prices by 18-25% plus charge me 4% because I want to use my credit card, plus charge me to sit in the seat 5%, plus charge me for air and water in your establishment, that’s fine. Let me know up front. Last I checked a “gratuity” is a tip not a given charge. If we want to give the person money, we give them money. Not some kind of autopay situation.

The New Normal on Tax TiPs and Taking

Digital transactions make it much easier to bleed out cash. In the old days, you needed a wallet, you needed to take out money. Even more recently, you needed to take out a credit card. Today, you don’t need to do that. The money isn’t money, it is a number in your app. You don’t feel the number going down. You don’t rummage through your pocket for change. You just hold up your hand and poof its done. The feeling of the exchange no longer exists. It makes it simple to siphon off cash because there is no cash.

We are seeing this in all aspects of our lives. We auto pay for services, we subscribe to services, we push buttons that we agree to all the terms without having any idea of what we give up in our rights. We also don’t have protection because the government is doing the same thing. They tax you for breathing today. We have thrown tea parties for less.

I realize this is not going to change and that we are embarking on a new generation of digital commerce. The unintended consequences of this are far reaching and very costly. Business far, wide and in all shapes and sizes are finding ways to drain our accounts. On the other end of this, we aren’t making a lot more money than we used to and we aren’t seeing the relative value in service increase.

I don’t know about you, but I am sick and tired of filling out surveys on “how we are doing.” You want me to fill out a survey, pay me. If I ask you to do something you expect to get paid. We have shrinkflation, less value, less service, more expense, easier to spend, can’t see what we are spending and less value.

The Unseen Cost: Time as the True Measure of Value

Time, unlike money or material possessions, is a non-renewable asset. Once spent, it is irrevocably gone. In economic terms, every moment consumed by corporate inefficiency and greed whether waiting on hold, navigating confusing interfaces, or enduring service delay carries an “opportunity cost”. This cost represents the value of the next-best alternative activity that could have been pursued, be it earning income, engaging in leisure, or spending time with loved ones. For a consumer, this is a tangible loss, even if it doesn’t appear on a corporate balance sheet. They have no care or sense of our time because to them it does not matter. Even as I write this on WordPress, I have to close the application and reopen it to edit because it doesn’t work correctly. I am 100 percent confident WordPress is using “agile” methods to build software they charge that doesn’t work correctly. It is now acceptable that things don’t work the way they were designed. The burden on wasted time is on consumers while companies count pennies of time on their end.

This is not merely an unfortunate side effect; it is a systemic transfer of cost, where the corporation’s gain in internal efficiency directly correlates with the consumer’s loss of valuable time. This dynamic highlights a fundamental power imbalance, as businesses implicitly devalue consumer time by not accounting for it in their operational models. We as consumers don’t value our own time. Even if we did, we don’t have an easy way of gaining back anything from these companies. When the phone doesn’t work for T-Mobile, give them a call and see how they handle it. When the internet service doesn’t work right, ask them online for help, see how it works. When the credit card companies are meant to protect you with transactions, go ahead and test this out. In many cases, you waste more money in time messing around with them. If you would have just said “ahh efff it, I’ll just eat the $59 bucks and move on.” They know you’ll do that now and they are counting on it being difficult for you to do anything about. The whole new world economy is based on “I agree” to any terms deemed by a provider of a good or service. Nothing is even made to last anymore.

The Human Dignity of Time: Beyond Economic Metrics

The erosion of consumer time transcends mere economic considerations; it touches upon the very essence of human dignity. Philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between “price” and “dignity.” Objects possess a price and can be exchanged for equivalents, but beings endowed with dignity are “beyond price, of non-quantifiable value that is non-fungible and therefore of infinite worth”. Human beings, by virtue of their rational nature, are considered ends in themselves, not merely means to an end.

If, as some philosophical perspectives suggest, the “only ultimate source of utility is the disposition of time” , meaning that the objective of life is to optimize the enjoyment derived from one’s time, then the systematic expropriation of consumer time by corporations takes on a profound ethical dimension. Such practices, by treating a fundamental aspect of human existence time and its capacity for utility and self-realization as a fungible commodity whose cost can be externalized, reduce individuals to mere instruments for corporate profit. This diminishment of human autonomy, the inherent capacity for self-determination and self-rule, transforms the “tax” from a simple economic grievance into an affront to the very essence of human worth, demanding a response rooted in philosophical principle, not just economic calculation. In other words, your time is all you got. The value is beyond measure but we don’t value it and companies surely don’t value our time. They value their time. Not only do they value their time, they charge for their time and they are very cautious about how much money they spend on the people commodity relative to time.

Yeah I am Angry

You see, you don’t understand, this is the way the world works. It is this way and you must accept it or you can choose not to participate. Reddit is a cesspool but every once in a while I like to learn from it. The faceless trolls will tell you what they think because they are cowards who can say anything behind a faceless and nameless identity. Just as you can learn a lot from a dummy, you can learn a lot from people unrestricted in their thinking and unbound with their perspective and words. It ain’t pretty but lifting the boards up to see the subflooring of humanity reveals what needs attention. I went onto reddit to bring up some of these points. As expected, the faceless and nameless assume I am old and out of touch. I don’t know how things are because I am from the nineteens. They can’t even speak and spell because their parents handed them a tablet and pushed them into a corner to face the world through a screen but as the world evolves this is a factor. You see we are devaluing each other and digitizing ourselves into a highly digital connected but human disconnected world. We are nothing but a transaction, even in person. We become a number or some form of digital identity. We represent a sale or a potential sale. The larger the company the less value we represent. You get what I am saying? The smaller the business the more value we represent but with a caveat. For many even in small business, we are becoming simple transactions because they are seeing the only way to grow is through or beyond being small. They have to be small and act big.

From end to end on my trip, I paid attention to the transactions. I paid attention to the experience. It was very uncomfortable on many occasions and there was nothing I could do about it. In discussions with most people about these topics, they have accepted the way it is. Especially in the context of my trip experience. You should know ahead of time that when you go outside, you are in the public and this means you accept all that happens in public. You should know and accept that companies don’t care about your experience. You should know and expect when you are traveling in other countries that poverty and human beings are treated differently. Human trash, human filth, human beings living in their own garbage is highly acceptable while you party on the other side of the wall. It is acceptable and understandable and you should know. Stop living in a box, understand that this is the way it is.

As people today, look through their phones to see the world, they don’t experience the things they say they want to experience because they are taking videos and pictures of that in which they want to capture to create the story. The actual experience could and mostly will be uncomfortable because no one cares about the experience in the real world as long as the companies get their money.

So yeah, a bit angry that we are all now similar to that little child in Africa that needs our help to eat. Until of course we turn off the tv and forget about her. We are now in the “I agree” economy. We agree to all of it just by showing up. More to come….