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Death to the Greedheads of Premiumization!

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Ted Rall

           The Five Boro Bike Tour is a glorious treat for big Apple bicyclists accustomed to dodging car doors, taxis and potholes in search of skimpy unprotected bike lanes blocked by double-parked delivery trucks. Once a year, the humble urban biker is elevated to king of the road.

You set out early one morning from the Financial District for an all-day exploration of some of the city’s most fascinating nooks and crannies. You navigate wide avenues l free of motor vehicles and make your way around Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. You and your fellow cyclists enjoy free reign of some of the biggest bridges and highways, culminating with the final, challenging climb across the Verrazano bridge over New York Harbor to Staten Island. I did it more than 20 years ago and still remember shouting with joy as we coasted under the giant green reflector signs over the FDR Drive, nary a car in sight.

            I was planning to do it again this May. Then I found out about the fee.

            “Standard registration for adults and youths costs $129, plus processing fees, $27 of which is a tax-deductible charitable donation to Bike New York to fund our free bike education programs,” according to the Tour’s website. (Not that free.) When I did the tour two decades ago the cost was nominal, about $30. Now they’re charging $256 for two people—for a paper tag with a number on it and bottled water along the way? That’s the same as two nights in a decent hotel room, two Amtrak tickets from New York to Washington, two very nice restaurant meals, eight really good books.

$256? That ought to cover a bicycle rickshaw and someone else doing the pedaling.

            What really sent me into a blind rage, however, was the tour’s Dickensian caste system: For $400 plus $84 in “processing fees,” or $968 for two people—President Biden’s “junk fees” bill comes to mind–New York’s toniest cyclists can buy “VIP” tickets. VIP status buys you “guaranteed placement in the first start wave,” a “timed climb” across the Verrazano, breakfast and lunch, and some swag. The famished peasants who can only afford $156 cool their heels as they watch the VIPers chow down and speed off in front of them.

            There will be a Revolution. It will be violent. As always, the rich will go to their deaths wearing that idiotic wide-eyed “I’m totally surprised” expression. Us? Why are you so angry? What did we do?

            May these overprivileged bastards tumble over their handlebars, smash their designer helmets and empty brains on the pavement, and tote their custom, limited-edition Tour-branded Manhattan Portage bags on their tumbrels to the fires of Hell.

The bike tour’s sponsors and organizers appear to have succumbed to what The New York Times reports is a new trend of “premiumization” in the corporate world. “Businesses have long segmented customers, trying to push richer ones into pricier and more profitable purchases: Think of the spacious premium seats on a plane versus the cramped economy-class alternatives. But the trend picked up during the pandemic, and the lurch toward luxury is now spanning a wider array of products and services,” according to the Times.

Consumers may fall for it, but most of us despise premiumization. A 2016 study of “air rage” found that economy passengers were 3.84 times more likely to have an air-rage outburst on planes with first-class sections, and even more likely if they had to board through first class on their way to coach.

One of the best things about biking is that it’s a proletarian pursuit. You can buy an excellent bike new for $300—even less used on eBay. Bikes are inexpensive to maintain. You can wear shorts and a T-shirt. And it’s free transportation! The tour’s gentrification of something as liberating as bicycling is a galling corruption of a small-d democratic space.

Nowadays no product or service is so humble as to be immune from attempts to subject it to hateful first-class/coach class stratification. The Times notes that Krispy Kreme plans to sell “premium specialty doughnuts” during the holidays. What are you going to ask your child to eat, our new expensive doughnuts or our old regular crappy ones? After building consumer loyalty with generic weed, legalized cannabis companies’ next step is to upsell by offering higher CBD and THC content. “WD-40, the firm that makes the lubricant of the same name, has found that customers will pay more for products with enhancements, like a can with a ‘smart straw’ to spray the lubricant in two different ways—in either a precision stream or more of a mist.”

            Let the peasants lubricate imprecisely.

            Premiumization has failed in amusement parks. After annoyed visitors stopped attending, Disney was forced to roll back obnoxious fees for parking at its parks and reduced the number of “premium days”—i.e., high-demand days to visit, because people find those days convenient—for which it charged extra. “In the nine months through September, attendance at [Six Flags] parks fell by 25% from the year before, spending per guest rose 22% and, in the end, profits fell by nearly 10%.”

AMC Theaters has taken heat for its plan to shunt poorer moviegoers into slum seats with poor sightlines. “The movie theater is and always has been a sacred democratic space for all and this new initiative by @AMCTheatres would essentially penalize people for lower income and reward for higher income,” tweeted the actor Elijah Wood.

In a capitalist economy, of course, democracy is an illusion. Prior to AMC’s move the best seat in the house went to whoever lined up first. Many people can’t afford to go to the movies at all. As for the bourgeois who all paid the same price to get in, some could get popcorn and Skittles while others went without. They drove different cars to get there. They went home to residences ranging from penthouses to housing projects. But Americans still value the fiction that everyone is middle class.

            Money talks, fairness walks. Premiumization will vanish if and when Americans decide to Just Say No to price-gouging, upselling and stratified consumer castes. As for me, I’ll save a few hundred bucks and conduct my own personal bike tour around NYC for free, at my own convenience—with no up-charge for dodging car doors and potholes.

            Until the Revolution, anyway.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Nothing to Worry about

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Ted Rall

Humanity seems absolutely determined not to do anything about the climate change crisis or the environment. But think about the bright side: rising oceans will resolve all sorts of issues that we actually pay attention to.

Inflation Is Irrelevant If You Can’t Buy Anything Anyway

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Ted Rall

Inflation worries are pushing down approval ratings for President Biden and the Democrats. But this might be one of those cases of two wrongs making a right. Or maybe three. You can’t really spend extra money on higher prices if there’s no one around to sell you a product, or if the product is still stuck on a container ship somewhere.

New DMZ Podcast: The Debt Ceiling Debate Triggers an Existential Discussion About Consumerism and Facebook Kids

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Ted Rall
From the left, political cartoonist Ted Rall discusses the dysfunctional political climate that gave us the ridiculous debt ceiling crisis with, from the right, political cartoonist Scott Stantis. Revelations in the Wall Street Journal about Facebook internal research and the company’s attempt to appeal to young children sparks a soulful discussion about everything from getting rid of your local cashier to self-driving cars.
 

Death to the D.I.Y. Society

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Ted Rall

Image result for self-checkout boycott

I admit it: my bias derived from self-interest. I was a bag boy. But that didn’t make me wrong when I reacted to the news that supermarkets would make customers bag their own groceries. This, I told my friends at the time, is the first brick in a road to perdition.

Since the 1970s corporate efficiency experts have burdened American consumers with a constantly expanding galaxy of tasks that businesses used to perform for them. Craig Lambert calls it “shadow work”—labor imposed on you that you’re not conscious of.

The Do It Yourself (because companies won’t hire workers to do it anymore) movement faced little resistance in a culture that elevates personal responsibility and rugged individualism. Which is how, in less than half a century, we have become accustomed to pumping our own gas and planning our own vacations and scanning our own groceries and running our own cable TV diagnostic tests, forgetting how much easier life was with service station attendants and travel agents and cashiers and technicians who came to your actual house. Not only do we work harder, we earn less due to the disappearance of service personnel jobs from the    labor market.

Corporate profits uber alles.

I recently visited a Burger King with touchscreen kiosks where you’re supposed to order your food because God forbid BK should fork out $10 an hour to a human being so you can simply tell him you’d like a #2 combo, size medium, drink is a Coke please. Come the Revolution may the scoundrel who thought of this be deported to an exceptionally unpleasant re-education camp.

Now that they have us doing everything ourselves, companies are making us provide our equipment as well.

On United Airlines from Los Angeles to New York recently, the plane was new—and the infrastructure was retro. In place of the seatback TVs that have long been standard on long-haul flights were plastic clips where you’re supposed to place your tablet or smartphone. You can imagine the discussion at United corporate:

“We’ve already conned the idiots into checking themselves in on their phones. Seat-back televisions cost as much as $10,000 per seat to install and maintain. Passengers have their own devices. Let them watch movies on their own tech!”

Liberal soon-to-be-fired executive: “What about old people who aren’t tech-savvy? Poor people without devices?”

“Screw ‘em. Plus they have to download our app and register to watch movies, so we collect more data!”

Liberal: “Some people might say we’re being mighty cheap for a company that makes $3.2 billion in profits a year.”

“And now it’ll be more billions!”

I have a smartphone. And a tablet. And a laptop. But as long as aviation remains a for-profit business sector (one with atrocious customer service), I don’t see why I should subsidize a CEO’s outrageous paycheck with wear and tear on my personal hardware.           It’s only a matter of time before we’ll have to fly the planes ourselves too.

Feeling stressed out? Overworked with a million little annoying things to do? It’s not your imagination. The D.I.Y. society has you performing jobs that older generations had done for them by someone paid to do it—and was better at it, too. Every upward tick of the Dow Jones Industrial Average is fed by the rising stress and anxiety caused by corporations schluffing their work onto us.

I would like to think that the market will self-correct by inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs to build businesses predicated on old-fashioned standards of service. But there’s no sign of that—not for ordinary people. Only the wealthy command bespoke attention, and only from luxury brands.

It is hard for most Americans to grasp how unpleasant the DIY society has made our lives because few of them travel overseas. If they did, especially to the developing world, they would find overstaffed restaurants and stores. Because labor is cheap in those countries, there is always someone available to wait on you. They can’t afford automation so the human touch dominates. Travel agents, for example—if you’re too young to remember the pleasures of having a professional work out a complicated multi-city itinerary and score you a great hotel deal via a personal relationship, you should try it when you go to the developing world. It’s a wonderful vibe and I miss it terribly stateside.

Our only hope is individual resistance.

It’s already begun. Many shoppers refuse to bag their groceries. Others are boycotting self-scanning checkout lines to save the jobs of flesh-and-blood cashiers. “They’re trying to basically herd everyone in, get everyone used to the self-checkouts to continuously cut down on staff,” a Canadian named Dan Morris explained to the CBC. “Machines don’t pay taxes, they don’t pay into the pension plan.” Only 11% of Canadians use self-checkouts.

On that United flight fewer than a third of passengers watched a movie. Who wants to clutter their device with an app for every airline they fly? I will avoid carriers like United and American that eliminate seatback TVs, favor those like Delta that are not, and so should you.

Any time a company gives you a choice between human and machine, like at BK, choose the person. Pick full-serve over self-serve. Patronize businesses that keep people on the payroll and avoid automated BS.

The DIY society will probably win. But we shouldn’t go out without a fight.

(Ted Rall, the cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

CES 2015: Staring Down the Spectrum of Consumer Desire

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Ted Rall

Originally published at ANewDomain.net:

It occurs to me, while following announcements of new gadgets coming out this week at CES 2015 in Las Vegas, that new technologies fall into different spectrums of desire. From a consumerism standpoint, new tech falls into four discrete categories (assuming one can afford them):

  • Love: Products that, either consciously or unconsciously, you’ve always wanted and that you fall in love with the second you see them. For me, the musical equivalent is the Ramones: I loved them the first time I heard them. The iPod was like that. As soon as a friend explained that you could put 10,000 songs on that one tiny device, I was in, no further sales pitch required.
  • Like: Stuff you don’t immediately care about, but come to desire after you learn more about it, whether by watching other people use them or learning more about them some other way. Musical equivalent: the Sex Pistols. First time I spun the disc, they sounded like an unholy racket … though I sensed something deeper, wittier and even smarter under all that noise. Twenty listens later, I was a fan. When tablets first came out, I didn’t grasp the appeal of a screen larger than a phone but smaller than a laptop — that is on all the time. Watching friends use theirs brought me around. For others, it was advertising.
  • Dislike: Things that you personally dislike, but have to get in order to participate in society. I feel that way about The New Yorker magazine and social networks like Twitter and Facebook — I don’t care for them at all, yet I buy in. Mostly in order to avoid feeling disconnected from my friends and colleagues.
  • Goods you won’t buy. No matter what.

So lets look at some promising goods CES is full of this year, and see what spectrum of desire they fall under.

4K Televisions

These are TVs with higher resolution than the standard 1,080-pixel wide model that’s probably in your living room right now. They’ve been around for a few years, but the price points (roughly $7,800 in 2012) have been way too high for the average American. Now that 4K televisions are being sold for under $1,000, and are actually approaching the $450 average price of a standard flat screen, we are being told that 4K is about to become the new standard.

4k television ces 2015

That’s probably true. Streaming content providers like Netflix are teaming up with manufacturers to make it so, in the words of Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard, but I suspect that most Americans currently categorize the purchase of a 4K television somewhere between categories two and three, between “maybe” and “only if they make me.”

Mainly, this is because most human beings’ eyes can’t tell the difference between their current flat screen, which really looks damned good if you think about what television used to look like, and the newfangled ones. Inertia rules: why replace a perfectly good TV?

Well, because they’ll make us. For instance: bye-bye Betamax, hello VHS.

Nevertheless, 4K purchases will increase in the next couple of years as the old flat screens are discontinued and dismissed by appliance store salesman as obsolete, not because of pressing demand by viewers for higher resolution, but because the industry is moving that way. You’ll love it soon, I bet.

Self-Driving Cars

This year’s CES is showcasing the early stages of driverless cars in the form of vehicles that park themselves and then come back to you all by their lonesome. This happens as though delivered by an invisible valet with apps that unlock the door, start the engine and adjust the internal temperatures so that everything is just perfect before you get inside.

Hmm.

Polls show that Americans don’t really know how to feel about driverless transportation technology. They think they’re cool, but also disquieting. Some understand the efficiency and safety advantages, such as the fact that a highway could hold two or three times as many cars at rush hour while traveling at higher rates of speed, and that a computer can react more quickly than a human being distracted by a text message.

self driving car CES 2015

For geeks, driverless technology clearly fits into category one, a must-have. For the rest of us, there will probably be buy-in — but not before a lot of education. Driverless cars don’t mark the rise of Skynet, but there’s still a creep factor in surrendering control of the road to a device you barely understand. (If you don’t believe me, take the AirTrain into JFK airport. No conductor. I’m not a fan.)

And don’t get me started on the possibility that hackers could tap into your auto’s controls and drive you off a cliff.

I’m 95 percent sure driverless cars will become a thing. But there’s going to be a long psychological adjustment period.

Internet of Things and All Those Little Gadgets

Energy Management appliances and devices that use sensors, algorithms and predictive technology to save energy on your refrigerators and home cooling and heating, on the other hand, will likely enjoy intrinsic, immediate appeal to many, if not most consumers. Who doesn’t like to pay less?

Until now the sales of devices like the high-tech thermostat Nest have been constrained by their relatively high cost. As prices become more affordable and accessible, they will become standard in many homes.

Robotics, wearables and virtual reality products, on the other hand, will divide consumers into each of my four categories of consumerist desire: love, like, dislike and hate.

Google Glass and the Apple Watch anticipated for later this year are, depending on who you are, either the coolest or derpiest things ever. People either want to be seen everywhere with them or not caught dead near them. Some people even want to ban them. I believe that these will be divisive for the foreseeable future, until the marketplace and popular culture arrives at some sort of consensus over whether these are must-haves or must-avoids.

Me? I’m all in when it comes to 3D printing. How about you?

How To Get Laid Off

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Ted Rall

Originally published at Breaking Modern:

Why don’t you spend as much as other generations? So called Millennial culture has nothing to do with it. Odds are, you’re just broke. And here’s how to get laid off if you aren’t.

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