Reminder, prior to the 1980s, America largely had an entirely different and actually equitable business model, even in large corporations: Customers first, employees second, investors third. This makes sense because if customers and employees are unhappy, the business will fail. It was well understood that happy customers + happy employees = investors make money and are happy too.
Then the greed class, led by people like John Francis Welch, apt last name, and sold by mascots like Ronald Reagan, waged and won the class war handily by convincing the laborers it would be unseemly to engage in class war while they were economically slaughtered. Unchecked greed went from being acknowledged as the vile personal failing and personality deficit it is to being America’s core cultural value, one we’ve been exporting globally ever since to my shame by association. The George Baileys appealing to basic humanity were snuffed out, and we now all live
in Pottersvilleon Pottersearth. (These are It’s a Wonderful Life references, for the uninitiated)Now business priorities are defined by truly sociopathic capital markets, and the global business model is now investors first, investors second, investors third, and fuck you your position was outsourced to an 8 year old slave child in Bangladesh so I can pocket an extra dollar lol.
That’s why you’re miserable as an employee, and why you can’t get service worth dogshit as a customer. Blame the capitalists who decided to cannibalize their own societies and planet for short-term profit. The ones that were already making a lot more and living larger than their employees, but demanded to live like modern Pharoahs on humanity’s back.
Because it’s worth you subsisting in fear and uncertainty, unable to afford to actually live a decent life, to travel to places and have experiences, so that the big mega yacht an oligarch commissioned can have a slightly smaller support mega yacht to tug it around and go where the big mega yacht is too big to fit. Priorities, duh!
I mean what’s stopping a business from returning to form? Putting customers first could start change.
The quintessential Walmart dilemma stops it.
You make a hardware store with knowledgable, helpful, well paid staff, ethically sourced quality products, and sell hammers for $20 because that’s what your buying power at your scale allows you to turn a reasonable, sustainable profit on.
Walmart pays overseas slavers to make 10,000 hammers at $1 each and they sell them at the new Walmart that just moved in for $7. Customers need to find it themselves because the employees correctly don’t give a shit as they’re paid shit.
Sadly, us peasants have proven, given the opportunity and out of necessity, we will support Walmart and their $7 slave labor made, slave labor sold shit hammer, before supporting a local business with ethical business practices selling a $20 hammer, even at higher quality.
Oh and after Walmart has put main street out of business with $7 hammers, they’ll raise that price to $18 and pocket the difference, as was the plan.
Integrity costs more to deliver than exploitation, and the less you have the less you can afford to support integrity in business. That’s why most of America’s main streets are shadows of their former selves, that degradation started far before Amazon and internet shopping started doing to Walmart what Walmart did to honorable entrepreneurs.
Americans sure do love a “great deal.” over time though, those great deals cost us all more than we could imagine. We never considered the inevitable outcome of those great deals we got by dealing with amoral, exploitative businesses. We were so short sighted that we just assumed that those amoral businesses willing to hurt anyone from employees to suppliers still had the customer’s best interests at heart. We thought we were in on the hustle with those $7 hammers, when we were just another mark.
The Internet helps with this some. I’ve found a number of companies, American Giant, American Blanket Company, Trayvax, Liberty Table Top, Awesome Coffee Club, and 360 Cookware that are all from what I can tell, doing it right at the higher price that comes with.
They can stay in business because they don’t have to maintain brick and mortar stores and appeal to the lowest bidder to stay in business.
It’s definitely hard to convince friends to actually spend the extra money though.
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Corporate profits are unpaid wages.
This reminds me of walmart feigning being some poor defenseless constantly on the edge of being broke company to guilt employees into overworking themselves and not bothering to ask for raises.
“We made 1 billion in profit!”
“However we updated our estimates half way through the year to match our early growth and we did not meet our expectations”
“We’ll have to let you go”
I’ve been in this meeting!
The watermark in the 2nd panel feels excessive.
I tried hitting the follow button but it didn’t work :(
