I've rented movies from Hollywood Video for a long time now. When I arrived in Stockton, I was happy to see the chain doing smashingly here. So, I signed up here to continue my membership. I then rented a few movies (as my Netflix is taking forever to figure out my real address...they keep changing my address to bizarre ones that don't make any sense, and thus, I can't get any of my Netflix movies, nor do I even know where they are).
Well, yesterday, I went in to rent another movie, and I was then asked if I wanted to purchase "insurance" for 25 cents. The old way of damage to a dvd or video being handled on a case by case basis, with the company understanding that sometimes damage does happen, is over. Instead, now you have to pay an overpriced amount of money to rent a movie (about four bucks for an old movie, which is really somewhat ridiculous in the era of competition against monthly charges from the mail service companies that rent movies) AND you now have to pay 25 cents per movie, or you will be charged full price for a dvd if it is damaged in any way. I said no, rented my movie, but when I turn it in today, I will NEVER rent from Hollywood Video again.
This reminds me of when Netflix thought it had a captured audience and raised the rates for all of its services. I was on the 5 movies at a time rate, and they raised my rate by about seven or eight dollars (could have been more). My response was to push my service back down to the 3 at a time rate. My understanding is that a LOT of people did this, and a LOT of people just discontinued the service completely. So, proving a basic proclamation of Economics 101, raising the prices did not mean more money, but even less. So, Netflix, realizing it was losing massive amounts of business, and seeing that Blockbuster was about to hit the scene of doing the same exact business, lowered rates to their original amounts. So, I upped my service back to 5 at a time.
This also reminds me of how bad a state our big box stores are when it comes to electronics. In the old days, a company like Panasonic would make a VCR that would last years without any need for repair. They made GOOD products. Well, now, everyone that makes electronics makes crap that lasts a year or so, if lucky. So companies like Best Buy are now producing a new profit stream by "offering" you additional "protection", kind of like the mob offers you protection from their own goons. If you pay $70 or so bucks for a $300 purchase, you can be guaranteed that when the sucky product you bought breaks, you can get it replaced. This replaces the old process of where a company actually backed its products by replacing their products that broke.
What it appears is that these companies are looking for more and more ways to separate us from our money. They aren't doing us a "service" by charging us more for something that used to be expected. And the usual argument is that "prices are cheaper these days", but that has nothing to do with the value of the product. It has EVERYTHING to do with the labor process they use to get the work done. Panasonic making a shitty product has nothing to do with Best Buy getting extra money to replace Panasonic's shitty product. The labor is cheaper already because we're outsourcing so much of this stuff as it is. Most of the profit is going into profit sharing of shareholders, not into the production of good, long-lasting materials. It certainly isn't going to the college kid working at Best Buy to work his way through college. It most definitely isn't going into training because the only knowledgeable workers at these places are ones that are techno geeks who already know about the products before they took the job in the first place. In my experience, especially here in Stockton, 75 percent of the workers at Best Buy should be feared for their lack of knowledge and sometimes their inability to think logically. Just yesterday, I had a guy tell me that a chair in Best Buy was $200 and there were none available, even though two were on the shelf behind me, clearly marked at the regular price of $146. He didn't even bother to look at the shelf but just spouted out a wrong number, convinced that was all he really was required to do because of whatever reason an hourly worker believes is the reason he doesn't need to actually know what he's doing.
Which brings me to rudeness. I'm not sure when this happened, but when did hourly workers suddenly become impediments to the buying process? I've gone to restaurants lately where you get no service, and when you do, it's some very rude person who really doesn't want to be there. I had one guy start an argument with me (BEFORE I SPOKE) that appeared to be continuing an argument he was having with someone else before he reached my table. I'm currently reading Slavenka Drakulic's
Cafe Europa, about the observations a female Croatian writer has about the transition of Eastern Europe to westernization. She has a chapter titled, "A Smile in Sofia" about how shopworkers in former Communist countries tend to be very rude and unfriendly, mainly because this was how they were trained to be, and there appears to be no rationality as to why they should change (as being friendly is often interpreted as suspicious behavior in an economic transaction, coupled with the idea that when you have a job for life with no fear of ever losing it, your customers need you more than you need them). So, this leaves me wondering if there's some similar dynamic happening in America, but with an American spin. Instead of having jobs for life, perhaps there's a feeling that the jobs being filled in the retail world are so low of scale that there's no fear of having to be friendly because even if they lose the job, it's not much of a loss in the first place. I wouldn't give this a second thought, but when you come across a friendly person, it makes these other people stick out like you wouldn't believe.
This may sound strange, but it's been the foreign folk in retail so far that tend to be the friendliest. I rarely like to bring up race or ethnicity because I'm not a strong believer in any type of differences, even in mindset alone, and I understand that my experiences may just be spurious ones with no connection to the bigger picture at large, but when at the mall, I found two typical American college students working at the pizza counter that treated everyone who came across them as distractions to their job. I ended up deciding not to eat there and went to the Chinese food counter where a very nice young woman of Asian heritage spoke in a very friendly manner and even put forth the comment that she didn't understand why those guys were always so rude to people.
Stumble It!
Well, if you are in Europe, Asia or Latin America, Newsweek gives you a cover that is quite similar. Not if you're in the US. In the US, we get a picture of Annie Leibowitz. It's kind of hard to make a comment. The pictures pretty much tell all. This is probably why more and more young people get their news from the Daily Show. You can't really count on the regular news sources anymore in this country.
