Happy Birthday [Insert Name] from your corporate overlords
My birthday was last Sunday and I received hundreds of birthday greetings from friends, family, and corporate America. The screen capture above is the corporate greeting that stood out. Not for its warmth, not for its offer of $20 off of fees. No, this one stood out for one reason. It told the truth—I am not a person, I am not even a number to this company. I am simply a customer. That is my only value to them. I am sure that all of the personalized emails I received from other corporations were really just a farce. My name and birthday came up in their massive databases and they sent an email to a potential customer offering some token discount to get this customer to come in. They do not care if Mark E. Andersen,
Emperor Lrrr from Omicron Persei 8, or even Glen the Plumber uses the 5-percent-off-a-dessert coupon included in the email. They just want to separate someone, anyone, from the money in his or her wallet.
Over the course of the last decade or so, more and more Americans are feeling as if they hold no value in the corporate world. We hold onto jobs we hate because we have nowhere else to go. Employers cut our wages, lengthen our hours, and we just take it—a job is too valuable to lose in this economy.
Robert Reich echoed those same comments in his April 26 column when he said:
The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.
Companies are treating workers as disposable cogs because most working people have no choice. They need work and must take what they can get.
There was a time in this country when one could graduate from high school, find a good blue collar union job, and make enough money to raise a family, buy a house, and even save enough money to send the kids to college.
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Today, many feel lucky to have a job that in many cases does not even put food on the table. Wages have not kept up with inflation. We have all become more and more productive, we take our work home with us, we are connected to work through email and smart phones. We don't take time off for fear of losing our jobs. Yet to the companies we work for, we are just a column on a spreadsheet under a header called "Labor Costs."
Of course, it isn't just our employers who make us feel as if we are valueless, as Reich points out:
Consumers, meanwhile, are feeling mistreated and taken for granted because they, too, have less choice.
Our complaints go nowhere. Often we can't even find a real person to complain to. Automated telephone menus go on interminably.
Happy Birthday Customer is the gleaming example of a corporate world where who you are matters less than how much money you can spend.
The demonstrations in Ferguson and Baltimore, the protests in Madison, all erupting after young men were killed were a direct result of the powerless feeling that many of us have. Surprisingly, the COO of the Baltimore Orioles, John Angelos, put much of this in perspective when he responded to a sports radio talk show host who stated that "...demonstrations that negatively impact the daily lives of fellow citizens are counter-productive." Angelos said:
...[M]y greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.
The innocent working families of all backgrounds whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government pay the true price, and ultimate price, and one that far exceeds the importance of any kids’ game played tonight, or ever, at Camden Yards. We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S., and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don’t have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans.
This feeling of being powerless, of not having a voice—that is the root cause of the violence in Baltimore and in Ferguson. The death of a young man in both instances was the spark that set off the explosion.
Iron Maiden, one of my favorite bands, had a song off of their Number of Beast album called The Prisoner. The introduction to the song that was taken from a British TV show of the same name. That intro included the following dialogue:
We want information, information, information.
Who are you?
The new number two.
Who is number one?
You are number six.
I am not a number, I am a free man.
We all like to think we are free; however, how often have you felt as if you were a prisoner in your job, as a consumer, in your socioeconomic class, as a human being? We may not be sitting in prison cells, but we are prisoners in some sense of the word. We cannot leave our jobs, we are forced, thanks to less and less competition, to make purchases from larger and larger corporations. Some people, due to circumstances beyond their control, are prisoners in their own neighborhoods due to crushing poverty and a lack of services. The corner grocery store is long gone, replaced by larger and larger stores where we are anonymous faces to collect data from. Information about our TV viewing habits, what books we read, what movies we watch are all more important to the corporate world than who we are.
We have seen our jobs shipped overseas, our wages stay flat, and our politicians, through gerrymandering and unfettered access to campaign cash, are for sale to the highest bidder.
Our society is becoming increasingly polarized—the haves against the have-nots, the powerful against the powerless, and the rich against the middle class and poor.
When I was a child in the early '70s, my dad used to take me to one of the last remaining corner grocery stores in town, Streber's Grocery, on the corner of Milwaukee and N. Marquette streets. Dad used to lift me up and set me on the cooler, and give me an Orange Crush while he and Mr. Streber talked about the weather, the Packers, or other topics. That is a scene that cannot take place in most American cities today. It is a memory I will always cherish.
While we will likely never see corner grocery stores again, if we want a country where we do not feel powerless, where we are not just a number on a spreadsheet, then we need to stand up, organize unions, and work to elect politicians that will answer to us, and not big money donors. We need to break up the too-big-to-fail banks. We need to see more, not less, competition in the marketplace. And we need to take our identities back.
To CheapOAir, who sent me the lovely birthday greeting last Sunday, I am not just a customer. My name is Mark. I am a single father, a writer, IT professional, and a veteran—I am more, much more, than just my wallet.