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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

It seems like most industries are moving towards no support because "we need to scale at all costs and to the detriment of customers" seems to be the capitalism drumbeat. Customers these days, to many companies, are just statistical artifacts in their system.

I had a case the other day where I called my insurance company. The automated system couldn't understand my answers (I was actually trying to answer the given prompts rather than just repeating "representative" over and over). It replied "it looks like we're having a problem" and proceeded to just say goodbye and hang up on me. More than infuriating, and that's an understatement.

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The problem is that there's zero law enforcement against corporation-vs-consumer fraud. Companies have noticed and are taking advantage of it (basic market pressures - if they don't, their competitor will).

Why make it easy for our customers to contact us (presumably to make a claim - ie the whole reason insurance products exist) when we can just pretend it's easy, collect money based on that lie and get away with it?

This isnt capitalism. It's more corporatism.

Capitalism responded to market forces and the needs of the customer.

Capitalism also tends toward the mean at the expense of the edge cases.

Yes, companies which have real customer service will in theory have a competitive advantage over companies which have a voice response system that hangs up on the customer.

What often happens though, is that consumers go with the lowest price above all other considerations. Then they get the hard lesson in "you get what you pay for."

It's the same reason that air travel is so awful. You'd think that one or more of the airlines would compete on comfort and service, but that's impossible when travelers go to Expedia and overwhelmingly pick the flight with the lowest price.

I personally don't pay rock bottom for insurance, and I have an agent I can call and talk to without any intervening voice menus. A human in a local office answers the phone.

You pay health insurance out of pocket? I was referring to my medical insurance provided by my company.

I in general try to speak with my wallet, so to speak, but it’s like posting into the ocean. And with some things, like mail and shipping services, there are no options.

That's all semantics, we can't say "Capitalism is when the system does good things, and Corporatism is when it does bad things", the difference is not meaningful since Capitalism leads to/is Corporatism.

Disagree. A robust anti-trust environment would alleviate 90% of these issues. What we are in now (in the US) is an environment of corporate political capture, which is not inevitable, as a similar situation was demonstrably reversed in the early 20th century by strong anti-trust legislation and enforcement.

The companies get away with this because they have massive market power, and they have used the wealth generated by that power to capture our political system.

    Capitalism responded to market forces and the needs of the customer.

Did it? When? I can't name a single era when "capitalism" (a fuzzy term) actually responded to consumer demands in the way that the parent poster described. Whether it's railroad robber barons screwing over farmers, Ford selling cars with an unacceptable risk of catching fire, or Google arbitrarily deleting people's entire digital identities, large corporations have always treated their customers as a collection of statistical artifacts (to quote another poster elsewhere in this thread).

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