Dis-service

It is shocking how much the culture of customer service has deteriorated in some industries in just a decade or so. Sure, the recorded voice will tell you, "Your call is important to us", while placing you on hold, and the person at the other end (once you get connected to a real person) will apologize for the inconvenience you experienced, but in many cases it is just a veneer on a very rotten material. Not in all cases, because there are still examples of great service: recently I had a problem with Amazon.com's website and called the phone number for help. The recording told me that no representatives were currently available and asked me to leave a phone number, so that they could call me back. I did leave a number and a few minutes later received a phone call from a person who then proceeded to resolve my problem. It truly was a very positive experience.

Airlines, on the other hand... My very recent trip was a reminder of why I started to hate flying. From an exciting and somewhat exhilarating experience, flying has transmogrified into this experiment in how much humiliation and bad service can customers endure. For starters, I was shocked to discover that the airline I fly the most is now charging $15 per checked-in bag! I was not warned about that (my last flight had been in June) when I purchased the tickets online. Had I known, I would have packed smaller toiletries and avoided the 5 oz rule. At the airport I was facing the choice between throwing out my toothpaste, deodorant, and a couple other things, or paying the $15. I chose the latter, although mad as hell.

I don't even want to mention this humiliating circus of taking off your shoes, pulling out your laptop, putting all your toiletries into a quart-size ziploc bag, etc. You can't really blame it on the airlines - it was a bunch of mass-murdering fanatics plus an overreacting government, whom we got to thank for this. However, was I really naive to think that maybe these 15 bucks, plus the fact that more people would now try to squeeze their luggage as carry-on, would result in shorter waiting at the carousel?  Yes, I was very naive. So, the airlines decided to start taking more of our money, without giving us more in return?Interesting.

There is also this not-so-new idea of no longer serving food on flights, but instead, selling boxes of junk food. At first they were still giving away these tiny bags of pretzels, but that apparently proved too expensive, so no pretzels or peanuts for you, unless you pay $5. Next step - and I'm sure it is coming - charging a buck or two for the sodas. This is going to be a tad problematic, because we've been told that it is crucial to drink enough liquids during long flights, so initially they will get away with this by offering bad tasting water for free. However, that will soon be taken away and you, "our valued passenger", will be on your own.

When I think about it, it is not a terrible idea per se, this charging for everything separately. If I don't like airline "food", why include it in the ticket price? Same with hotels: I don't watch TV, so I actually would be grateful if they took it out of my bill.  What I don't like is the sneaky, arrogant way they are doing it. If you fly only a few time a year, like I do, you're going to be shocked by increasing cost and deteriorating service. It's like seeing a patient with incurable, slow-growth cancer every couple of weeks - each time you are shocked by how much he changed.

I know, the times when people dressed up before a flight, when the smiling stewardess brought you food and goodies, and real silverware, are not coming back. But how about bringing back some dignity and choice? If they don't want to offer free food, maybe they can sell decent meals instead of these horrible packages of junk? Let me buy a salad, but don't price it at $25 a bowl, please.

What about leg room? I obviously can't aford (or I am not stupid enough) to pay the horrendous prices for 1st class tickets, but I would probably pay reasonable amount for a little bit more space, so that I don't feel like a sardine in a can for 4 or 8 hours. How is this possible that in a country as entrepreneurial and competitive as ours, nobody has yet come up with an idea to beat the airlines at customers service? It's gotten so bad, that I would not really take a lot. Not even real silverware.

Evil DRM

I have always believed in paying artists for their work. This included, of course, music. Except for a short-lived "lets give it a try and see what the fuss is about", I did not participate in peer-to-peer sharing. Early on I signed up for the subscription-based Musicmatch, and was pretty happy with it, occasionally buying songs and creating compilations for listening in my car. Obviously, I did not expect that I will end up feeling like a total sucker, thanks to that evil scheme that must have been concocted in the devil's head: DRM (Digital Rights Management).

I had misgivings about it from the very beginning; initially. Musicmatch restricted transfer of purchased songs to a limited number of instances (5 or 7 in a lifetime, if I remember correctly). I was not planning to buy an MP3 player any time soon, but I had a laptop and a desktop, which I used to replace every 2-3 years. This meant that only after two replacement cycles I would no longer be able to transfer my music to new machines. What then? Luckily, this was amended later and I could only have 3 "active" devices at any time, but I could "deactivate" a device, and transfer purchased songs to a new one. This looked like I could keep moving the music I owned from one computer to another for as long as I lived.

I had no idea that the licenses for my songs were tied to the service I bought it from: Musicmatch. So when Musicmatch was acquired by Yahoo!, I faced the real prospect of losing the ability to transfer my songs, unless I agreed to move to the new service, which would then continue to provide the licenses. I did move and for a while everything seemed fine, except that every now and then the DRM system used by Yahoo! would stop recognizing my ownership of certain tracks and would force me to re-license them. This was but the first circle of the DRM hell...

A few days ago I found out that 40 of my songs were no longer showing as licensed... My attemtp to re-license them produced errors that Musicmatch was no longer available... This, many months after I transfered my subscription to Yahoo! and all my songs to their DRM system.  What the bloody hell?? When I contacted Yahoo! customer service, the answer I received was that since these songs had been purchased from Musicmatch, they could no longer help me with licensing... Musicmatch no longer existed.

Well, I knew that! So I argued that I transferred to Yahoo! and expected Yahoo! to provide licenses for these songs, as I had been promised. This generated a response that "it does not matter where you transferred them. It only matters that they were purchased from Musicmatch". This is just too f..d up to comprehend! Imagine buying a CD from your local music store. This CD will play only for as long as that store remains in business. A new chain takes over the store and agrees to keep allowing you to play the CD, if you continue to buy music from them. Then, one day, you still have your CD in pristine condition, but it stops playing. You complain and hear, "Sorry, but you bought this CD from someone else. Can't help you".  If that's not getting screwed, I don't know what is...

So I feel like a total idiot for being honest and law-abiding, and getting suckered into the game of Let's Screw the Loyal Music Fans Who Actually Want to Pay Us Money. Would you buy a CD, whose playback depended on the existence of the store you bough it from? Or a car that runs only for as long as the dealer that sold it to you is still in business? You would not even consider such a deal, beacuse that would not be a deal, that would be a con. And that's exactly what was done to me (and countless other): we were conned. 

Now Yahoo! is getting out of the music business and offering its customers transfer to Rhapsody. I'm afraid that this will just push me deeper into the DRM hell, so I think I will decline. Should I reconsider my decision not to be a part of "illegal" sharing?  Well, if the "legal" side of this business means that I'm getting robbed at will, then I think the answer to that is not as simple as I thought it to be.

A cure worse than the disease

Why is it that whenever the government bureaucrats try to "fix"something, their solution is often clumsy, burdensome, and illogical? Take the airport security, for example: after the Lockerbie bombing the airline personnel receiving luggage from passengers was required to ask every passenger 3 inane questions: "Did anyone unknown to you give you any items to carry on board this aircraft? Did you pack these bags yourselves? Have these bags been in your possession at all times since you packed them?" This went on for years and I haven't heard of any bombing or hijacking attempts that had been thwarted by that dumb procedure. Luckily for the government and the airlines, the passengers played along and did not bother to answer these questions truthfully, as this would have wrecked havoc. ("To be honest, since I packed these bags yesterday I left them unattended several times to go to the bathroom and to run errands." "Full check, please!")

Immediately after 9/11 security screeners confiscated, among other things, nail clippers, although it must have been self-evident to anybody with half a brain that after the events of that day no hijackers would be able to take over an airplane, even with box cutters, let alone nail clippers! The formerly operative advice, "Stay calm and do what the hijackers tell you to do" has gone out the window, even before any government official declared it invalid. After the most recent bombing plot discovered in the UK, people not only had their shampoo and toothpaste confiscated (this was, at least, somewhat reasonable given the nature of the threat, apparently involving liquid chemicals smuggled on board and then combined to make explosives), but laptops were also banned from carry-on luggage for no discernible reason whatsoever. This latter directive was recently rescinded, but it is still bewildering why it was issued in the first place. It is still somewhat of a miracle that the government did not make us fly barefoot, given the scare with the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid.

Of course, this could be dismissed as a mere nuisance that makes otherwise comfortable lives a little bit less comfortable, but with minimal societal costs. It's a very different story with legislations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which, in reaction to the Enron debacle, imposed a lot of onerous requirements on businesses, stiffling American competitiveness and hobbling the stock market. As the Opinion Journal's John Fund writes: "Increasingly, Hong Kong and London are the places where companies are finding it easier and cheaper to list their shares and raise capital. Last year, of the 25 largest initial public offerings in the world, only one took place in America. This year, Hong Kong is likely to end up as the No. 1 market for stock offerings world-wide." This sort of governmental overreaction can have consequences far more costly and damaging than a silly ban on nail clippers.

Ethical Americans

Cavid Carnoy, editor of CNET, wrote a piece describing a very generous return policy at Costco and Sam's Club, that allows customers to return a product during a course of its lifetime (which, potentially, could be years) for a full refund, provided that the product isn't damaged. Carnoy wonders if this isn't an invitation to abuse: given the rapidly falling prices of high-ticket electronics, people will be tempted to exchange that expensive last year's HDTV or LCD TV for this year's bigger and cheaper models.

What's really interesting is the reaction of the article's readers in the Comments: most commenters piled on Carnoy for... lack of moral judgement in suggesting such an unethical way of abusing a return policy of a great company! Aside from the fact that the readers obviously misread the author's message, their outrage is very encouraging. Apparently, there are plenty of people with high moral standards in America, at least among CNET's readers.