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Greed impedes the growth of morality on a wide scale. I have worked for many companies that would institute policies which encourage bad behaivior on the part of the public. You can't tell customers the truth because they can't handle the truth. It makes them frowny and petulant, makes thier wallets and purses pucker. Hey, whatever makes them happy. The customer's always right. As long as they keep coming back.

I work for Blockbuster. I'm not proud of it. A few months ago an old lady came in at 1PM and turned in her movies. She was the kind of rich old lady who has lived parasitically off her husband for fifty years and doesn't know anything about anything. Our policy is that movies are due by noon. We say so when we hand you the movie, it says so on the reciept, it says so on the cover of the movies, and it says so in the agreement that you sign on the membership application. I pulled up the lady's account and there were multiple notes explaining that she always turns her movies in an hour late, and we always warn her not to do that. There were three or four credits on her account from clerks who caved in to her complaining.

My philosophy is not to enable people to live in denial, but rather to tell them the truth. I informed her that after having been warned many times not to turn her movies in late, she would have to finally pay a late fee (judging by the size of the rock on her finger, I didn't expect it to put her in the poor house). She went ballistic. I stood firm. She actually told me that she should be allowed to return her movies whenever she wanted. I countered that she had signed a business agreement to the contrary. I tried to show her the contract she had signed, but she waved it away dismissively, and said "I don't know anything about that." When I refused to let her slide, she pointed a finger at me darkly and said "I can't believe you would treat your customers this way. I am NEVER coming back." I admitted that her coming back would not be in anyone's best interest.

Let's be clear about this. I was not being antagonistic. She was. I merely expected her to live up to the contract she had signed. But here's the twist. Although company policy was to charge people late fees, thier policy is also to make the customer happy. This is a conflict when you realize that a vast majority of the public are not rational. I know this because I have worked with the public for ten years. I have performed hundreds of thousands of transactions and I know the public well. That woman was not living in reality, she was living in denial.

The executives that run corporations fully expect the low-level cashiers to take the brunt of this erratic behaivior, ignore it, and strive to make the customer happy. This has a deleterious effect on the cashiers by placing them in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance, and has a deleterious effect on society by encouraging the public to be lazy and stupid. It's immoral. But it makes a profit, not so much for the cashiers who do all the work, but for the executives who have never set foot in the store and don't have to face the consequences of thier policies.

Blockbuster has now decided to do away with thier late fees altogether. The reason is that thier recently evolved competitor Netflicks (which is the leading online rental company) did some market research and found that the one thing people disliked the most about movie rentals is the late fees. Consumers felt like they were being punished. Life is so stressful and crazy, that getting the rentals in on time is a hassle, and getting charged fees is a pain. It's just not fair. This is of course pure bullshit.

When you sign a membership with a rental company, you agree to borrow thier property for a set time for a set fee. You also agree that if you fail to return the property you have borrowed at the time you have agreed to, you will be charged an additional fee, which you have also agreed to by signing the paper. So these people are not being penalized by the company, they're penalizing themselves. But instead of accepting the blame as a warning to pay more attention, and taking full responsibility for thier actions like an adult would, these emotionally stunted people scapegoat the company, shifting blame from themselves to someone else, thus allieviating the pain of facing reality. It reminds me of something Carl Jung once said: "All mental illness is directly related to the inability of the individual to experience genuine suffering."

Now, if you were to take that to court, the judge would agree. But that doesn't matter to greedy corporations like Netflicks and Blockbuster, what matters is the bottom line. The profit. The magic numbers. Corporations will do anything allowed by law (or a good lawyer) to make a profit. Period. And the only reason corporations do anything good or nice is image. Image sells.

These days corporations pour lots of time and money into figuring out how to hack consumers nuerologically, how to tap into the inner consumer. No longer content to simply inform the consumer about the merits of thier product, corporations now seek to delve into the fragile unconcious of the American consumer in order to: a) produce a knee-jerk buying response and b) condition the consumer to repeat thier transaction as a daily habit.

I do not, however, blame the company. I blame the consumer. Capitalism just gives people what they want and they don't always want what's best. Rather than live purposeful, intelligent, meaningful lives, many American consumers I have encountered in my ten years of "customer service" choose to be comfortable, entertained, and ignorant. I'd say about 80% of people. They don't read the fine print. They don't care about the employees. In fact, they feel sense of ownsership over the employees, believing that the "customer is always right". I hope whoever coined that phrase died slowly and painfully for ruining the everyday lives of millions of clerks and cashiers and by encouraging immorality on a wide scale.