Comment by bruce511
3 days ago
Businesses aren't in business to prioritize the customer point of view [1].
They are not in business to prioritize the employees point of view.
They are in business to maximise revenue, and profit.
If you work for a business, your job is to work on their priorities. By all means object or quit if you don't agree with them. (And yes, assume you'll be fired for refusing to do their tasks.)
If you're a customer, and you font like their behavior stop being their customer. You have agency. Use it.
[1] good customer service, good customer experience, are all good for revenue. Happy customers are the ultimate success. But maximizing the revenue from those happy customers is very much the business goal.
The old "use your agency" response never gets old does it, no matter how much consumer alternatives are whittled away, and no matter how much the abusive corporate behaviour gets ratcheted up and normalized. Do you actually make a profit yourself from forcing ads on paying customers who can't choose to avoid your services, or just aspire to one day?
Thats a cop out.
There are lots of alternatives to McDonald's.
There are lots of alternatives to most things. Some cost more money though. That's kinda the point.
If an "alternative" to McDonald's does exactly the same abusive thing it isn't a real alternative to McDonald's at all.
If an "alternative" to McDonald's forces you to drive excessive distances to reach it, or it costs much more, or it sells Thai food instead of burgers, then it isn't a real alternative to McDonald's.
A suitable alternative to McDonald's would be one similar enough to McDonald's for your purposes that you can use it to replace McDonald's. I'm sure some people have that, but I'm also sure many people don't.
There are lots of things that don't actually have suitable alternatives. There are entire product categories that are completely filled with consumer hostile garbage, with zero competitors offering a suitable alternative, because sometimes it will always be more profitable for companies to refuse to give consumers what they want.
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What if I can't drive all the way to an ad-free restaurant or for that matter an ad-free gas pump? What if I buy a plane ticket to get out of this bad situation and the airline is using the emergency PA to harass their captive audience of paying customers to join their miles club? What can't be avoided must endured, but there is no reason for people like you to insist that this is fine or normal, or that it's something one can opt out of. You're actively building the dystopia when you do that
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As others make clear here you have agency in theory, but in practice your ability to use that agency is very much dependent on how well the world enables the exercise of that agency. Something to think about, interdependence and all that.
> They are in business to maximise revenue, and profit.
Correction, "they" are not a hivemind with one goal, they are a collection of individuals with individual goals to maximize their own profit. If some marketing employee can get a bonus or promotion by showing ephemeral monetary gains at the expense of the long-term integrity of the product, they'll jump all over that.
It does not have to be this way. This should not be claimed as some kind of law of gravity-like nature of the universe. Businesses have operated in an enormous variety of manners over the years and continue to do so. Businesses have agency.
Just look at EA vs Nintendo for one. And I'm not even a Nintendo fan.
Badmouthing bullshit practices of a company is also a part of the agency here.
E.g. Yes, I hate that McDonalds (like tons of other companies) is incessantly bugging me and quite blatantly trying to upsell me. As a result, I rarely go to such places anymore. So they lose my business. But I will also complain out loud. This is part of the deal with bullshitting your customer base. This is part of my agency. Losing me as a customer, as well as getting badmouthed left and right is the cost of extracting that 3 additional cents from me. Now the company also has a choice.
That’s nonsense. Some businesses exist purely to fund the ability to do exactly that thing as well as possible. Making money is a means to an end.
It’s just that they always seem to lose to those that optimize for money.
I think some small businesses start because the owner wants to do something well. Sometimes this aligns with some group of customers and it's sustainable.
Most small businesses fail of course. Usually because while they do a task well, they're bad at the business part.
Once you get large (McDonald's in the parent thread) the focus is necessarily on the business part. At that scale it's not "doing the thing as well as possible " - it is "making money as well as possible".
Clearly lots of people use McDonald's. So they provide customers with satisfaction. But that doesn't mean they aren't out to maximize revenue.
One of the things that’s surprising about traveling to Europe and Japan is that this revenue maximizing business strategy isn’t as prevalent. You don’t see the same upsells everywhere and tipping culture is also mostly non-existent. Many US businesses managed to behave in a manner that was vastly less extractive to their customers for most of the last century as well. It really is possible to care about the quality of your business in some cultures, it’s just harder to do so here today.
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McDonalds has fallen so far in the past few decades. I used to eat there or at least grab a soda several times a week. I never go there anymore. The kiosks suck; I refuse to use them, but they don't staff the counter half the time so there's no other way to order. The drive-thru expects you've already ordered on the app. Fuck that. It's all way too complicated. I want a Big Mac meal with a coke. That used to take me 3 seconds to order and I had it on a tray in about another minute. Now I have to dick around on the kiosk for a couple of minutes, pay, and then wait 5-10 minutes for the food. It's absurd.
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> Most small businesses fail of course. Usually because while they do a task well, they're bad at the business part.
Some small businesses fail because larger ones see their initial success and compete by making a slightly worse product a bit cheaper. Sometimes a significantly worse product. Once the superior but smaller competition is either out of business or has been forced to reduce their quality to try compete on price, the bigger business can either reduce the quality & price further (the big business will usually win in this sort of race-to-the-bottom because they can afford to take losses on individual products for a time, where a smaller business cannot) or bump their price up to improve margins.
It sometimes isn't that the small business is bad at the business part, but that they refuse to play dirty even if playing dirty is the only way to compete. It is easier to rationalise some tactics in a bigger company, because there is no one who has to look the customer in the eye who is also making product quality affecting decisions.