I Just Work Here

            To whom it may concern, this is corporate America and corporate is not concerned. If you have never heard the phrase: “I am going to stop coming here,” then I am legitimately shocked. People love to throw this threat around. I once received it from an out of town customer who was never coming back again anyway. They are frustrated by what they perceive as bad service, I get that. Whether justified or not is a different story, but I’ll let you in on a little secret that applies either way. No one cares. Small businesses are few and far between. Name every coffee shop, grocery store, bank, or pharmacy you know that has less than ten locations and see how many you can come up with. The country is run by corporate giants and an individual customer is not even a blip on their radar.

            From an employee perspective, short of a significant loss in business resulting in reduced hours, pay, or a full out location closedown, the pay is the same whether the store gets this one individual’s business or not. From a corporate perspective, five billion dollars is not that different from five billion one hundred dollars. Now people might think certain places care about their customers because they give them free stuff in light of their complaints, but really that is just the epitome of their apathy. Rather than even bothering to devote a minute of their time to the actual nature of your complaint, they just throw you a gift card and hope you’ll shut up.

            There is such a disconnect between customers and businesses anymore, that your comments really are meaningless most of the time. Those who can actually enact change are beyond reach and those who you can actually speak to, they just work there and can’t do anything about it. They wouldn’t even be able to put you in touch with someone who could do something about it. Most corporations have created a chain of command so expansive, the person in charge of the company probably doesn’t even know what the stores sell. The CEO is too preoccupied with meetings and investors to address your concern about the lack of a designated crosswalk in the parking lot of store number 6305. But what is the store manager going to do, go out and paint one himself? Well who is in charge of parking lot maintenance? I don’t know, someone at corporate. Here is the company contact number, why don’t you give them a call, get transferred fourteen times, and spend an hour on hold before being transferred back to the lady you talked to fifteen minutes ago, maybe that’ll work.

            -AMS

Welcome to Bureaucracy, Please Sign In

            Let me tell you a story of my childhood. My school was located about a mile from a park. About midway down the road to the park was an intersection with another road that, were one so inclined to walk down, would find themselves some five or ten minutes later at the foot of the drive of my childhood home. Now one day at school, the teacher had planned for my sixth-grade class to walk from the school to the park, participate in some science based activity that escapes me at the present time, then walk back to the school arriving back just before dismissal. And so, on that day, my class made the trek to the park, we completed that activity of science, and we started down our return path to the school. Let me reiterate, the plan was to walk back to the school and arrive just in time for dismissal. Now as we walked back to the school, we passed by the intersection that led back to my house and I thought to myself. How silly is it that I am going to walk a half mile away from my house to get on a bus that is then going to drive me back to my house?

Now imagine you are the teacher responsible for the class. If a student had asked you if they could leave the group and just walk home from here, it doesn’t matter that they are twelve and perfectly capable of walking safely down a neighborhood road to their house. You are responsible for that child until such time that they leave the school at dismissal or are received by a parent or guardian. There is no way on your life you would let that child leave on their own.

            Accountability is very important. If you are sending your child to school you are entrusting that school to keep your child safe, and failing that any reasonable person would expect repercussions. However, can we just all admit that bureaucracy has gotten a little out of hand. Have you ever read a law. They can be pages and pages long. Laws used to be: Don’t kill anyone. Don’t steal anything. But as loopholes are exposed and precedents are set, red tape gets put up. The problem is it never gets taken down. We just keep putting up more and more and eventually we are all just going to be wearing red mummy costumes.

            Think about how many things you sign a month. How many privacy policies, terms of use, and various other contracts of accountability you adorn with your infamous three loops with a line through it. Why do you think people sign like that anyway? Especially if they have a long name. Ain’t nobody got time to neatly present their signature every time they charge a pack of gum to their credit card. Where are all of these credit card signature logs going anyway. Do you know how many people these days just put everything on their credit cards? If someone actually needed to retrieve one to settle a dispute it would be a nightmare to locate.

So, one childhood story and a bit of rambling later, I guess what I am actually saying is that, the overburden of bureaucracy has more or less bureaucracy ineffective. Disclosure does no good if people are so jaded they don’t even care to read the disclosure in the first place. What good is a law that isn’t enforced? Well, there are so many laws anymore, we’d have to lock up the world. Intervention for a hoarder: have less things but nicer things. It applies to bureaucrats too. Let’s do away with all of the redundancies and unnecessary requirements and reserve the red tape for when we really need it.

            -AMS