1998-10-06
The goal, in business, is to make money by convincing people to buy your product whether they really need it or not. Leaves, for example, fall from trees all by themselves. Left to their own devices, they rot into a nutritious mulch which is good for all things organic. Your local hardware store, though, convinces you to gather all the leaves with a rake ($14.95) and put them into plastic bags ($.35 each) so a garbage truck can hall them to a dump, where they are prevented from decaying by an insulating layer of disposable diapers ($22.75 per box).
There's pretty good money in the trinket business. But you can do much better than that if you can make people pay to not have the benefits of the use of your product. So if you sell leaf-blowers, the idea is to also get into the earplug business. If you sell enough leaf-blowers, you may also see your sales of rifles and ammunition go up.
Bell Telephone has a similar scam. As part of your regular phone service, they list you in the phone book. This must have cost them a lot of money at one time, to type in everyone's name and address and phone number. You would think Bell would have a little charge for it, on your phone bill every month: "Directory listing: $.25". But that's not the way it is. If you want Bell to NOT list in you in the phone book, you don't NOT pay Bell... you pay more.
Bell has another service: Call Display. Now, you'll notice that they didn't offer you a chance to say if you wanted your number to be on Call Display. Oh no. That would be too rational. Your number is on display whether you like it or not. No charge. Isn't that nice? Maybe not. Maybe that charge is included in your monthly phone bill. Actually, without a doubt, it's included in your monthly phone bill. You didn't ask for it. You didn't want it. But you're going to pay for it.
Well, suppose you don't want your number displayed. Bell says, "Okay. We won't display your number." Then they give you a discount, right, because a "service"-- displaying your number on someone else's phone-- is being terminated. Uh uh. Bell charges you extra. $5.00 a month. That's like Mr. Leaf Blower coming up to your house and blowing all your leaves into the street. If you don't pay, he blows all the leaves back. If you ask him to stop, he'll say, "Sure, for $5.00." Then he'll try to sell you an ear plug.
Anyway, you bite the bullet and pay them $5.00 a month to not display your number. How's that for business acumen! A few years ago, you didn't even want your number to be displayed on people's phones! You didn't ask for it. Now you're paying to not have it done. This is progress. This is customer service. Bell's mission statement must read something like: "We will persuade as many people as possible to pay as much as possible for services we don't provide."
I can't wait until they offer us "Call Undisplay Display"-- this service will show you the phone numbers of people who are paying $5.00 a month to not have their number shown on your call display. Does that seem unfair? Well, for an additional $5.00 a month, they will undisplay your number from display phones that display undisplayed numbers.
I understand business now. I am going to go into business myself. I am going to gather personal information about everyone, including gossip and rumours, and post this information on a big web site. I'm thinking of stuff like "bad breath", "an accident last year", "two drunk driving convictions", "looks ugly without his hairpiece", "stands on the porch at 7:00 a.m. in his underwear to let the dog out", "farts at movies". It'll be a lot of work, and I'll have to start mostly with people I know. I will also offer $5.00 per tip for any information other people send me about people they know. I also intend to copyright this information, since the U.S. government is now intending to allow the copyright of collections of facts. So if I put all this information into a data base, nobody else can use it without my permission. I plan to keep lots of lawyers very busy.
Then I will offer a service to the general public. For $5.00 a month, I will take your name off the website. For just pennies a day. For less than the cup of coffee! Isn't respect and public esteem worth this tiny amount?
Then I'm going to make even more money. For $10.00 a month, I'll let you see the information about people who have paid me $5.00 a month to not show it to anybody! What a country!
I have a second idea that's even simpler. For a mere $2.50 a month, which is less than half the cost of call display and some other service I can't think of, only pennies a day, the cost of a cup of coffee or less, I will install a device on your phone that shows you the number you have dialed.
Or did somebody already beat me to this one?
I plan to be very, very rich.