An Economics Lesson

[orangejulius]

I am subscribed or what you call it to the Sierra Club community here. I'm not entirely sure why. When I joined, I assumed that people used it to discuss various environmental issues or talk about Sierra Club activities. But mostly it is used for various people to post ill-conceived ideas about boycotts and online petitions that need to be

Comments

[knifegirl]

One of the things that really struck me watching The Corporation the other day is that making money (for its shareholders) is actually what a corporation is chartered and bound to do, it is not bound to make people happy or play nice or provide good service or good product or whatever. It does those things to the extent that they help it do the thing it was made to do.

I think people cling to boycotts because it is a simple way for a person to feel like they are not "part of the problem". I remember when nobody wanted to buy gas at Exxon because of the Valdez spill. Did that make any kind of difference to anything at all? No freaking idea.

[jaubertmoniker]

I appreciate this, because it illustrates the problems in the reasoning to which so many people are exposed, on both sides of the business equation. I won't go into the boycott issue, because you've covered that quite impressively, but I would be remiss not to mention the customer satisfaction issue that you touched on in this entry.

Having worked in retail for years, I can guarantee that the number one lie told by members of management to their customer-service staff is that a happy customer is a repeat customer (mutate that phrase as you see fit). Yeah see, uh, that's entirely bullshit. A happy customer will probably come back, but convincing yourself that it was because you spent a lot of time helping them out the last time they were in the store is masturbatory delusion. Why does Edna shop at the same grocery store every week? Because it's the closest one to her house. Or maybe it's not, but the closest one to her house doesn't have all the things she needs. Why do people buy Coke? Because it is positively ubiquitous, and