If You Like Having Faith in Humanity, Don't Work in Retail

2009-07-20T18:09:00.000-07:00

"Hello, ma'am, how can I help you?"
"Yeah, I wanna return this _____ I bought the other day."
"OK, do you have the receipt?"
"Well no."
"OK, well I can only give you the lowest price this item has been in the last 30 days, and I can only give it to you on a gift card."
"But I know I paid $XX.99 for it!"

I want to say, "Yeah, well, I don't," or, "Oh yeah? Prove it," but I can't. I invariably have to say, "Sorry, ma'am, company policy," or something like that. Even better would be if I could say, "Would you rather me give you nothing?"

Listen up, America. When you buy something, you get a receipt. This piece of paper is often the ONLY proof you have that you actually paid money for the item. Nowadays, if you paid with a card, we might be able to check our records if you remember which card you used. A retail store can not be expected to know who paid what for what in every transaction in the last XX days that a store allows returns. In fact, a store that allows any returns without receipts is probably screwing themselves over more than anything. For those of you who don't know, here's why allowing a return without a receipt is a bad idea:

With no proof you purchased the item in question, it's entirely possible you just snatched one from the store, removed all the tags in a fitting room, and brought it to the cashier. Once you've gotten "your money" back in a gift card, as JC Penney does it, you can purchase something else. The company loses money in this situation. Thankfully, there's no way for you to ever actually get cash or any legal tender recognized by anyone other than JC Penney from a return without a receipt, but the point is that the company can lose money.

The thing many people fail to realize about businesses these days is that they are businesses, that is, they are trying to make money. Anyone who doesn't go into a place of business with that bit of information clearly in mind is an idiot. So let's think - does it make sense for a business to take a customer's word for it that they purchased something, without proof? No. The burden of proof ought to be on the customer - at least, that's the way a business can prevent losses.

So why do businesses like JC Penney have policies that can be easily exploited? Because their business is dependent on making people happy, and making people happy often has very little to do with being reasonable. As a "customer service associate" I am trained and told to go to great, often unreasonable lengths to make a customer happy. "It's about the emotional connection," they say, "the experience."

"Who," I want to ask, "would shop with their feelings rather than their minds (which are presumably better at handling money and such things)?" The answer is, apparently, most women and indeed most Americans.

There's a larger point to this than me just ranting about my job. I believe today's retail industry reveals a lot of what's wrong with American society today. Specifically, it reveals that American consumers demand that they put forth minimal effort in getting what they want. 'Why should I put forth effort when they're the ones getting paid to help me?' is how the argument goes. This sort of mentality pervades all of American society - especially in how Americans relate to their government. It's the government's job, they think, to provide for them, to help them.

This is part of why I said in my last entry here that America would need a tyrant for most citizens to support the necessary revolution. Too many still rely on the government to survive, and too many others aren't affected enough for them to take much action. We live in a society where many people expect to be given what they want, rather than having to work for and take what they want. Sure, retail customers still have to pay for their merchandise, and most people still have to pay taxes, but we're losing values like independence and responsibility, purely because they aren't necessary to survive anymore. And as evolution teaches us, those traits which are not useful for survival are less likely to be passed to the next generation.

There is one hope for America, even if the people of this generation decide to rely on the government as they have been. Perhaps not everyone alive now can become responsible for their own survival, perhaps they are already too far gone, but anyone can raise a child with those values. If we teach the next generation to learn from our mistakes, to take rather than demand to be given, then perhaps when the next generation makes it through their education, they will not need the government to survive. Maybe they'll be able to enact the political changes I see as necessary even today. That said, I won't give up on my own generation yet. To assume nothing can be done right now would be to fall into the same trap I've been warning about. But for now, I can't have the above conversation with countless customers and hear anything but the sound of inevitability. I can't help but think... if this is the type of person that is unwittingly a microcosm for all American society, God help us all.

America Needs a Tyrant

2008-08-05T19:09:00.000-07:00

Democracy, to be effective, necessitates that citizens make informed decisions in electing public officials. It also necessitates that participation in said elections is maximized. The lack of both of these criteria in present-day America has been well documented by various sources in recent years. It is no secret that Americans suffer from disillusionment with the system that has governed the country for the past 221 years. Advocates of political reform blame certain traditions for the complacency of the vast majority of the electorate. The near-exclusive dominance of the Democratic and Republican parties receives much criticism in particular. The inability of candidates with ideas not found on either party’s platform to succeed in the political process is a serious hindrance to the marketplace of ideas said to exist in any free republic.

The two-party system in America causes political power to move in a cyclical fashion. One party rules one or more branches of government for a time; then when people get sick of them, the other party takes over and does the same thing. On the surface this prevents entrenchment of any administration and represents an overall tendency to moderation in the electorate – however, the bleak reality is that in recent years the two parties have become increasingly indistinguishable.

More important is the fact that even in their differences, they both want the same thing – more government. The term “limited government,” spoken so frequently in the days of the Revolution, is rarely used today. There is virtually no successful politician that advocates this backbone of the Constitution anymore. The term is found nowhere in the 2004 Democratic Party platform, and only vague allusions are made to it in the Republican platform. Even then, its status is simply rhetoric; America has not had a limited government mindset since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Since then, the public has been content to allow the government to provide them with ever-increasing services, and now this trend threatens to culminate in a fully socialized healthcare system.

These, however, are political issues. The sociological issue at hand is the sheer complacency with which the public accepts the cyclical status quo. This attitude makes change virtually impossible, and without change the government will undoubtedly become more powerful, while the public remains ignorant. It is momentum rather than public will which pushes the government thus, and the media likes to call this momentum “progress.”

The political system at this point is a lot like a train – it has one track on which it runs, and it runs with great energy in one direction on that track. To stop the train and get it going back the way it came – in this case, towards a more limited government – would require a great deal of force in the opposite direction, something which the pervasive apathy of the general public prevents. The only other option for stopping this “progress” is, continuing with the analogy, to derail the train – in a word, revolution.

Most people would be scared of any violent or nonviolent upheaval of the government because it would mean the one thing of which they’re truly most afraid – change. But any system of government, over a long enough timeline, tends to become corrupt. And no one will question that the American system has done exactly that. However, they still think that the system can fix itself. This is not true. The answer to corrupt politicians is not to elect more, albeit different, corrupt politicians.

In an often-quoted letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In another letter, he wrote, “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion… The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Almost no one would prefer death to liberty anymore, as Patrick Henry did. But then, the situation is entirely different now than it was in the days of the Revolution. We have no George the Third, no Intolerable Acts, no tyranny. And therein lies the danger.

The government of England wasted little time pretending to be in the best interests of the colonies – but the government of America has learned from the mistakes of England. The endless rhetoric concerning the good of America may not fool Americans into trusting the government, but it at the very least does not incite them into rebellion. It calms the citizens enough to begrudgingly give the government a little more power every few years, and they have no intention of stopping. In order to cure Americans of their complacency, what this country truly needs is a tyrant.

The Sane Asylum - Sociological Division

If You Like Having Faith in Humanity, Don't Work in Retail

America Needs a Tyrant