Self-Service and Self-Serving (24 March 2011)

Tyler Cowen linked to this paper (pdf) from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation about the many blessings it claims that information technology bestows -- enhancing productivity, tempering the business cycle, making markets more efficient, improving the quality of goods, allowing us to defeat time and space and live forever, and so on. IT, it seems, enables employers to get more productive work per employee by eliminating the jobs of those whose work has been automated out of existence and by "letting" those who remain "do more things at the same time" -- that is, blurring the boundaries between work and nonwork, surreptitiously expanding the working day, and accelerating work processes through multitasking with little regard for the increased stress and irritability this imposes on workers.

What bothered me most is the paper's paean to technology-enabled self-service. Yes, I know, everyone loves checking themselves out at the grocery store and talking to robots on the phone instead of human customer service agents. We all recognize how companies have our best interests in mind when they get us consumers to do things they once had to pay an employee to do. Aware that some of us remain reluctant to rhapsodize over self-service, the paper explores the issue in a dedicated sidebar, which includes this tendentious passage:

Unfortunately, self-service sometimes gets a bad rap. The media routinely portrays the efforts of companies to implement self-service options as creating work for the consumer solely for the benefit of the company. In reality, most self-serve applications don’t cost the consumer more time, they just involve one person (the consumer) doing the work, not two (the consumer and the employee). Granted while some self-service applications (e.g., “press 2 if you are interested in opening an account”) can be maddening and cost consumers more time, overall self-service technologies usually cut overall labor time (for both the worker and consumer). And in some cases, they can save consumers time and add convenience. Even where personal service provides consumers with more value (a chauffeur-driven car is seen as a luxury), it usually costs more (which is why usually why only wealthy people have chauffeurs). Other kinds of personal service are the same. They cost more money to provide than does self-service. However, in the type of competitive markets more companies are facing, savings from self-service are passed back to consumers through lower prices, at least over the moderate to long term. As a result, standards of living go up.

Yes, while quality of living goes down. Notice how the concept of "prosumerism" -- where consumers get to be productive "co-creators" or "innovators" alongside their favorite brand buddies -- is here revealed in its true guise. The company just presumes that the consumer is already an employee, no different from the cashier or stocker. Post-Fordist, immaterial labor and consumption as production is not necessarily about getting to join in with creative-class while they shape social meanings and recast our shared material culture; it's about getting consumers to forgo some of the services they were once accustomed to assume are included and do those things themselves, which add value to the enterprise. When shopping becomes "productive," that means it has become a job you do for them, not yourself. Self-service means "serve the company."

To wash this down, consumers are sold on "convenience" or the ability to skirt human contact that might disrupt their solipsism -- indeed, the paper suggests the idea of personal service is a decadent luxury, not something the firm has implicitly promised in selling services to us ("Only wealthy people have a chauffeur) -- and we are promised that we'll ultimately save money, which after all is the only relevant value in a consumer society. "Standards of living" in this context means exclusively the ability to buy and have more stuff, not to have better experiences or enjoy humanized exchanges in an economy palpably made up of people doing things for one another. Instead we are encouraged to live in a fantasy world where everything is made for our money alone, and naturally we have no choice but to help ourselves to it.

Tipping and Servility (18 Aug 2010)

A few days ago Matt Yglesias linked to a blog post by Rachel Ryan about restaurant-tipping customs in the U.S. Ryan notes that her European visitor thinks tipping is ridiculous and essentially anti-capitalistic, saying, "They chose to be waiters. They chose to work for minimum wage. If they want more money, get a higher paying job -- don’t expect me to tip you because you were nice and speedy. That’s your job.” Ryan admits she has no rebuttal for this, since her argument that tipping is a reward for good service is somewhat negated by the fact that we don't tip everybody for doing anything in the service sector (yet -- I've been encouraged to tip just about every type of retail worker I've encountered in New York City).

I think this misses the point about tipping, a paternalistic practice that serves to strip dignity from service-sector jobs, deprofessionalizing them, while giving employers justification for paying employees low wages. You can classify my argument here as part of my jihad against customer service. (Is it okay to use "jihad" that way? I need to ask my local Tea Party apparatchik.) I'll indecently quote myself: "Generally I’m against customer service, which is typically a bogus way of making shoppers feel more important than they really are for an activity that should in no way be thought to dignify them."

The tip shakedown is a variant on the idea that customers have a right to demand special service -- that they are able to buying the illusion that they are treated better than the other customers and are somehow better people. (How often is big tipping not a sign of customer insecurity?) Instead of getting the privileged service automatically, customers must hold out their dollars like treats to get service workers to perform tricks for them. Tipping always and everywhere demoralizes the people who are forced to beg for their pay in addition to doing their work. It's a barbaric backward practice that functions as a kind of institutionalized corruption, as it assumes that workers are all de facto extortionists who will only do something for you for a little extra. Tips are supposed to promote "friendly" service, and admittedly, you don't have to eat too many meals in Eastern Europe to notice a difference in the way customers are regarded. But I don't want waiters to act as though they are my friend, and I don't want them pushing more food and drink on me to inflate the bill and thereby inflate their tip (as one of the commenters on Ryan's post notes). I don't want "good service"; I just want appropriate service, and also not to feel like a phony pasha lording over the lower castes for the duration of my meal.

Being good at waiting tables requires skill and practice, and those who learn to do it well are consummate professionals. But the custom of tipping reduces their labor to a kind of implied prostitution. It builds in the assumption of their incompetence, as though it's only natural they they should again and again prove they are worthy enough to be paid what they should "really" be making.

"Manufactured uncertainty" (15 March 2010)

This post at Farnam Street, a behavioral economics blog, raises a point that always rankles me about purposely confusing pricing schemes designed to generate asymmetrical information. This is their take on nickel-and-dime fees the airlines have begun to charge:

Airlines are unbundling fares. 'Airfares' are lower but there are now fees for luggage, pillows, meals, coffee, and even washrooms (if the CEO of Ryan Air gets his way). What's really happening though, is that airlines are making pricing less transparent to consumers.
The real purpose of separating costs (unbundling) is to make it harder for consumers to directly compare prices between airlines. It is now almost impossible to directly compare total prices for one airline to another without a lot of thought. Airlines are banking on consumers not doing this hard thinking and choose a flight based on something other than the lowest price.

Voilà: financial innovation. Sometimes this sort of strategy is a divide-and-conquer play, where the customers willing to do the work of figure out the real prices end up getting a better deal than their "lazier" comrades. But generally it is simple obfuscation to circumvent the norm of unambiguous posted prices.

This reminds me of an old HBR article from June 2007: "Companies and the Customers Who Hate Them" by Gail McGovern and Youngme Moon. "Companies have found that confused and ill-informed customers, who often end up making poor purchasing decisions, can be highly profitable indeed," they begin, and then detail how management gets addicted to the baffle-the-customer approach. It begins when a price-discrimination schemes go rogue and begin to become deliberately vague, masking the ways in which fees are assessed. And it is abetted when there are natural or contrived hurdles for consumers to jump over before being able to switch to a new service provider. The brains in management realize that their customers have become fish in a barrel and then they open fire.

They single out banks, gyms and cell-phone companies for particular opprobrium: They cite how banks, for example, encourage practices that they can then charge penalty fees for -- overdraft "protection" comes to mind, something Bank of America has surprisingly decided to partially suspend.

The article concludes with advice for how companies might regain the favor of the customers they have abused, but I had the feeling that it was more of a how-to article with an epilogue tacked on for ideological cover -- the way authors would attach some moralizing to their pornography in the 18th century to get it past the censors.

Manufacturing neuroticism (16 May 2008)

I am on the record as being against customer service. It seems to me a trick to get us overinvested in shopping as a place where we can exercise our will to power. So when Yves Smith asks, in this post about a few ideas for new consumer-service businesses, "Do we want to foster customer neurosis?" I believe the answer is yes. Of course we do. Retailing is essentially the art of making insignificant choices seem paramount, and getting people hooked on the "thrill" of making such discriminations. Total neuroticism is the art practiced at its highest form and is a state of mind marketing in general is always preparing us for, stoking our fantasies of omnipotence and our insecurities about not belonging to group of preferred customers or whatever. (That is part of the logic behind retailers' loyalty programs -- those stupid cards you have to flash to get the sale price on items, like you are part of some elite cadre of special shoppers. Though the main reason for them, I always thought, was to track what you purchased and use that to compile demographic data to sell to manufacturers and advertisers.)

Perplexed by services for helping customers get the best rooms or seats within a hotel or particular flight, Smith asks "Is this much information really empowering, or does having such fine grading merely make some people unhappy when they don't get what their little website says is the best?" It certainly supplies the illusion of power and an opportunity to discriminate. I think it allows for the pleasure of making petty judgments, becoming ersatz insiders, and scoring insignificant victories over peer shoppers on a scoreboard that the insecurity mongers conjure out of thin air. Basically, when we as customers become fussy children, the retailers become our parental authority figures, granting or withholding the love we crave, even as we foolishly believe we are in control because we are being fussed over.

In a consumer society, shopping isn't about satisfying some set of wants extrinsic to the market arena -- it is about entering the arena and having our wants stoked and then satisfied, with our competitive juices stoked and our fantasizing mind fully engaged. Shopping is itself an experiential good; anything we take happen to take home from us is often just a souvenir.

Like Vaughn at Mind Hacks, I'm generally skeptical of neuroscientific research of the brain-lights-up-therefore-it's-true variety, but for what it's worth, this WSJ piece today explains that shopping is like crack smoking:

Research shows that people often do get a high from shopping -- the brain releases chemicals such as dopamine or serotonin when a person is stimulated by discovering something new, such as a handbag. Sometimes, aspects of the shopping experience such as friendly sales clerks, eye-catching displays or aisles that are easy to navigate can trigger brain activity that brings about these "euphoric moments," says Dr. David Lewis, director of neuroscience at Mindlab International, a United Kingdom-based consultancy whose clients include athletes, retailers and advertising companies. "The brain is turned on by novelty."

The writer sums up that "For the consumer, such studies serve as an important reminder that these euphoric moments do exist but they aren't necessarily triggered by the desire to own a particular item." I'm starting to believe that we convince ourselves we want some specific thing as an alibi so that we can enjoy the shopping experience as a whole. Like when I would sit down for some "writing" because I knew that would lead to cigarette breaks.

To a larger and larger degree, the wants occur after we have already decided to go shopping; they are not the impetus. So we don't start by wishing we could be "getting a better room" but we enter the sphere of services and discover that we can and then want to. The key for marketers is to keep us in that sphere -- a mental space more than a physical space -- where we are searching for things to buy, with buying becoming how we remind ourselves of our being.

Patient and inconsiderate (18 April 2007)

The cliche about New Yorkers is that they are rude and impatient. Some mistakenly believe that impatience is in fact a form of rudeness rather than an efficient system of communication among strangers pursuing a vast array of ends in a congested, shared space. Of course, I'm biased, but it seems most New Yorkers -- the ones working, the ones with places to be and things to do -- are generally aware of the people around them and together they all make a collective effort to keep things moving. Sometimes the awareness takes the form of attempts to outmaneuver one another, and efficiency in public space is achieved via the invisible hand of unrepentant individual selfishness and putting oneself ahead of those who aren't paying as much attention to their surroundings. At the risk of venturing a Ayn Randian species of counterintuitive thinking (selfishness isn't just not wrong, it's the only virtue!), I want to suggest that aggressive behavior in public (what is dubbed rational behavior in market contexts) creates a grid of expectations that allows everyone to pass through public space more purposefully.

On the road, this principle is illustrated when there are lane closures -- New York drivers tend not to respect any notion of civilized queueing, preferring instead a mad free-for-all of people cutting off other people. This seems theoretically "unfair" but it tends to keep traffic as a whole moving faster. (This is why in more quaint places in America, drivers are encouraged not to form one lane too early, expanding the areas affected by congestion.) True, too much lane changing in open road situations ultimately affects all riders negatively, contributing to volume-related slowdowns, but complacency and an abstract concern for respecting the rules of politeness only expedites road rage.

But the question of how aggressive one should be in trying to get where one is going is more pressing for New York pedestrians. The more aggressive one is in walking the streets, generally the more aware one becomes of the environment: if you are going to stand halfway in the street waiting to cross an intersection, you need to know what's coming. If you are going to jaywalk, you need to make sure you can get away with it -- as Dylan's dictum goes, "To live outside the law you must be honest." The troublemakers on New York streets are not the hyperaggressive racewalkers and Knievelesque bike messengers (whose moves are always predicable based on the presumption of their heedless selfishness and can thus be countered) but tentative tourists, who are apt to make unpredictable moves in full obliviousness of those around them. They likely feel this is their right as tourists, as flight from responsibility to others is probably considered part of their vacation in general. But maybe as a culture we should stop creating the mistaken illusion that it is possible to take a vacation from responsibility to others, that this could be bought and sold as an experiential good.

Kottke.org linked to this complaint about tourists who persist in being unaware of their surroundings. The author, Brooks of Sheffield, laments the "death of peripheral vision" and offers this interpretation of the essence of civic duty:

I was brought up to be constantly aware of others around me, to keep a sharp eye out to see if I was blocking someone's way, holding someone up. For the simplest way a civilized human being can show their respect for a fellow person is to register and acknowledge their presence, and recognize they have as much right to the surrounding air and ground as you do.

In New York, it's impossible to stay out of people's way entirely; but the edge of intrusions into personal space are made much more tolerable and forgivable when it is made clear they they are either undertaken reluctantly or with the intent to move things in general along -- when you know that its nothing personal and it was the result of calculation. What is intolerable is the species of selfishness that masquerades as mellowness and has no specific intent behind it and winds up communicating that the blissfully unaware person considers you so insignificant that they won't even deign to recognize your existence enough to be rude to you on purpose. Instead of being situational rudeness (that which is practiced by most New Yorkers), tourists practice a categorical rudeness, a self-satisfied indifference they have toward everyone else, who, as Brooks puts it, become "merely extras in the home movie starring themselves." And it seems to violate the categorical imperative, which is at the crux of the exchange below, from the comments on Brooks' post.

Laura Moncur said...
Sorry, but it's not my job to accommodate you. I watch out for other people, but that is strictly for my benefit, not yours. Assuming that the world should get out of your way isn't the answer.
Plus, those tourists bring a lot of money to your town. Be a little more respectful of them.

4/09/2007 10:02 AM
Brooks of Sheffield said...
Actually, Laura, it is your job to accommodate other people. It's everybody's job. That's part of what being a human being means. Civilization is nothing more than a thousand daily, silently-agreed-upon accommodations toward your fellow beings. And has it occurred to you that your attitude of looking out for other people only when it benefits you only works if there are other people in the world willing to look out for not just themselves, but others—like you.