Why would a company hate their customers?

Well, they don’t. But they sure look like it.

We’ve all seen it, a company with a good product and good employees that makes a stupid decision that has a huge negative impact on its customers. Why? Go figure?

The customers are mad, the employees scramble to overcome the situation and the senior management responsible for the decision vanishes and won’t talk.

If it happens once, we chalk it up to a simple, bad hair day. But when it happens over and over again, well, maybe something’s at the core and they really don’t care about their customers.

This kind of behavior is usually reserved for the government and monopolistic utilities — those people who feel like there is no recourse back to them so they don’t care what ire their decisions cause. But in this “how much have you made for me this quarter?” driven world, more and more brand names are guilty of bonehead thinking.

I’m thinking of a software company who routinely ignores their customer’s complaints, nay demands, to fix the obvious and dangerous flaws in their software products. The company plugs the problems and causes more problems until eventually they just claim that there isn’t a problem or tell their customers it will be fixed in a future upgrade (which they will have to pay to get).

There’s a deregulated electric company who’s rates are some of the highest in the nation who constantly whines about how they can’t make a profit. Check out the compensation arrangements of their senior management and you’ll see where a lot of that profit is going.

And speaking of profit, what do you think about a group of companies who commonly run up the wholesale cost of their product for no apparant reason at all. Then they have the gall to crow about their record profits. Can you spell “gouged at the pump!”

But the real kicker in all of this is that we continue to buy products and services from companies that clearly could care less about us and what we want or need. In fact, the more insulting the company becomes, the more the sheep-like American consumer seems to be.

Eventually, these companies all fall. There is much evidence in business history about bloated and arrogant companies and how they crashed when competition finally grew strong enough to stand up to them.

Want to change the ways of companies who clearly hate their customers? Don’t buy from them, don’t include them in your shoppping and go out of your way to promote their, much better, competitors to your friends and family. It won’t feel like much change is occuring until one day you look up and the arrogant company is the target of a takeover or is on its third downsizing.

Then you will know how the free enterprise system has worked it’s magic.