Splendid Isolation

Category: Corporate Fuckery

Connectivity Assholes

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Two-Minute Hate

Normally I reserve the above epithet for people who have their phones surgically attached to their hands, or bosses who insist that employees Stay.In.Touch.At.All.Times., yeah even unto night time, weekends, and vacations.  (Just because you’re attending your sister’s wedding or mother’s funeral — requiring use of paid time off [PTO] instead of compassionate leave, FFS — doesn’t mean that your boss shouldn’t be able to demand your time to attend to That Pressing Corporate Need.)

No, the connectivity assholes I refer to here are “services” like GM’s OnStar, Hyundai’s Blue Link, NissanConnect, AcuraLink and Toyota Connect.  Via Insty, I see the following is happening (from the annals of Corporate Automotive Bastardy):

Connected services is a catch-all term for everything your car can send and receive over the internet. It includes features such as automatic 911 call-outs after an accident, roadside assistance after a breakdown, over-the-air (OTA) software updates, vehicle health reports which can be sent to your dealer, wi-fi hot spots in the vehicle, and phone apps that allow you to connect to and even control some of your car’s functions.

They’re also big business. Most connected services require a paid subscription once the free trail (usually three months to a year) runs out. As more and more of them are added to your dashboard, automakers hope to make billions of dollars annually just on subscriptions. That doesn’t mean older vehicles will be supported forever, though.

Anyone who’s ever touched a device with a computer chip in it knows that device will eventually be obsolete. Cellphones, even if they still work fine, will eventually stop receiving software updates. Right or wrong, this is the way of the world. The average American, though, keeps their car for much longer than they keep their phone, and the average age of a vehicle in America is nearly 13 years old. Meaning, a lot of people could potentially be affected if other automakers follow Acura’s lead in cutting off cars newer than the average. And that’s not to mention those who own used examples of older models.

While it’s arguably bad customer service, there’s no law or contractual obligation requiring automakers like Acura to continue supporting older models with outdated hardware and software. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Yeah, click HERE to accept the (300 pages of) Terms & Conditions Of Service.  (Wait;  you all do read those before clicking, right?)

Somebody tell me how many times I’ve ranted on these pages about people handing over their privacy and freedom of action in the name of “conveeeeenience”, because I can’t be bothered to look it up.

This is why, in all my lottery dreams, I am convinced that I would never buy a modern car, but would pay a premium (in service / maintenance costs etc.) just to own a car that is completely and utterly under my personal control.  I have actually come to the point where I would buy any car — in reasonable working condition — that has an ordinary key to start it, whose operating system contains not a single chip and does not send my usage data to just anyone who wants to see it, for whatever reason — which includes insurance companies, the police, the State, the advertising industry and all the other forms of bureaucratic bastardy that have infested our personal lives like some creeping fucking cancer.

A pox on all of them.

Don’t Care

Corporate Fuckery, Retailing

Of course we saw this coming:

Walmart is warning it plans to raise prices due to tariffs, despite the fact April’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) showing President Donald Trump’s tariffs did not affect consumer prices.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon issued the update during an earnings call on Thursday, stating that they will try to keep prices “low as possible,” but the reality is, they are unable to absorb all of the costs due to tariffs.

“But given the magnitude of the tariffs, even at the reduced levels announced this week, we aren’t able to absorb all the pressure given the reality of narrow retail margins,” McMillon stated, adding, “The higher tariffs will result in higher prices.” 

Utter bullshit.  As far as I can see, the tariffs may have affected the price of Chinese goods, but if anything, the goods made in places like Thailand, Taiwan and Pakistan should be reduced with all those other countries getting lower or non-existent tariffs.  So yeah, some of Walmart’s prices on Chinese merchandise should go up, but what they’ll do is raise all their prices to minimize the much-higher Chinese prices.  It’s called “spreading the load” in retail-speak.

Don’t care, because I’ll just stop buying non-foods at Walmart until things quieten down, and buy only the foodstuffs there that I absolutely cannot get anywhere else.  Last time I looked, that’s only one product, and amazingly, it’s made in the U.S.A. anyway.

Besides, if Walmart were truly committed to keeping prices lower, they’d improve their efficiency by ditching their fucking ultra-woke DEI practices — which would never have been instituted in the first place had Sam Walton still been around.  But they’re not going to do that, are they?

Feel free to do what you think is proper in your own circumstances.

But for me?  Toodle-oo, WallyWorld.

De-Humanization

Corporate Fuckery

It began, as these things so often do, with the banks.  “Bank tellers cost money”, they realized, so they looked at the data:  which showed that something like 95% of a teller’s job involved handing cash to customers.

So:  ATMs.  And instead of talking to a human when collecting your money, you had to rely on remembering a personal identification number and hoping that the mechanized teller wouldn’t screw up the money count.  Of course, there was a “benefit” to the customer:  24-hour banking (provided there was a working ATM where you needed it).  So one more little dent in human interaction, because who doesn’t want convenience?

Supermarkets did the same thing, eventually, when scanning systems became good enough to work more or less unsupervised — well, one supervisor to oversee eight checkout terminals was cheaper than paying eight checkout clerks, after all.

Here, the benefit was not customer convenience, because it takes the average customer much longer to process their own transaction than it does a trained cashier.  But screw the customer’s time and inconvenience, as long as we don’t have to pay for it, went the retailers’ thinking.  (I know this, because I was there when the self-checkout systems were first tested.)

But what about the long waits in line we had to put up with before self-checkouts?  Well yes, there is that;  except that the long lines were caused by supermarkets not having all the registers manned in the first place — the first of such cost-cutting measures, you see.

In both cases, fewer human employees meant lowered expenses and higher profits.  (It may have been sorta-kinda-excusable for retail supermarkets, who run on impossibly-tight profit margins — but far less so for banks, who have no problem charging usurious rates on credit card balances, for instance, in an industry which has never had to deal with tight profit margins (remember:  pay 5% on customer investments, charge 12-19% for loans and 27% for credit card balances — and those are just the most obvious ones).

Anyway, some folks in Britishland, of all places, have decided that enough is enough:

Campaign by senior citizens to boycott automated tills aims to protect local jobs and fight isolation in the community.

At the Marks and Spencer store in Bridgwater, 10 self-service checkouts are sitting in a row waiting to be used.
The one manned checkout, however, has a queue five-people deep. “If there’s someone on the till, I would rather wait four or five minutes to have a conversation,” says Antony James, a 59-year-old resident.
His sentiment is shared by many in the Somerset town where the Bridgwater Senior Citizens’ Forum has launched a rebellion against automated checkouts.
I just wish that everyone did this, and not just Old Pharttes.

Myself, I use cashiers most of the time, provided that I won’t have to wait for too long in line.

But what really gets up my nose is when there’s a waiting line in both automated and cashier points.  That is when I go all Old Phartish and find a manager to yell at.  And I mean yell, because frankly, it’s past the time for politeness and it’s what they respond best to.

My line:  “I was in the supermarket business for over thirty years, from stock clerk to cashier to store manager to senior executive in Head Office.  I know how supermarkets run, and you’re running this one really badly.  Now are you going to open another register or must I get in touch with your district manager or Area VP?” 

And if he whines that there just isn’t another cashier available, I yell:  “Then YOU open the till and run it until one does become available.”

Sometimes I just identify as a woman.  Named Karen.  And it doesn’t feel too bad.

Finally, from the above linked article:

The backlash appears to be even bigger in the US. Under new laws proposed in February, supermarkets would have to comply with rules that would limit self-checkout use to when a regular manned lane is open. Major supermarkets including Walmart, Target and Costco have begun limiting or banning self-checkouts.

That has not been my experience locally, but I wish it was.  I’d better end this post before I get really cranky.

Hooray– Oh, Wait

Bureaucracy, Corporate Fuckery, Gummint, Health

Here’s some good news:

Drugs used to treat cancer, diabetes and other chronic conditions are among 15 picked for negotiations that could result in lower prices for patients, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Friday.

The 15 drugs selected by HHS are all covered under Medicare Part D and represent the second round of negotiations between drug companies and the department, with a goal of lowering costs for Medicare patients.

And the good news:

Popular diabetes drugs Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy, which are also used for weight loss are among the 15 announced Friday.

Hooray!  Let me tell you, as one who has to take Ozempic for diabetes (at $60 per shot per week), this is welcome.

But wait!  There’s more!

Negotiations between the government agency and drug companies will take place this year with any agreed upon price changes taking effect in 2027.

…by which time I could be dead.  How nice.  Even better:

Drug manufacturers can choose whether or not to enter negotiations with the government for a collective price for Medicare patients.

Any bets as to who will decline the offer?

Snoops

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Surveillance Society

Yeah, don’t fuck mess with Texas:

Texas has sued insurance provider Allstate, alleging that the firm and its data broker subsidiary used data from apps like GasBuddy, Routely, and Life360 to quietly track drivers and adjust or cancel their policies.

Allstate and Arity, a “mobility data and analytics” firm founded by Allstate in 2016, collected “trillions of miles worth of location data” from more than 45 million people, then used that data to adjust rates, according to Texas’ lawsuit. This violates Texas’ Data Privacy and Security Act, which requires “clear notice and informed consent” on how collected data can be used. A statement from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the suit is the first-ever state action targeting comprehensive data privacy violations.

How so?

According to Texas’ complaint (PDF), the data collected included “a phone’s geolocation data, accelerometer data, magnetometer data, and gyroscopic data, which monitors details such as the phone’s altitude, longitude, latitude, bearing, GPS time, speed, and accuracy.”

With that data—plus, in some cases, data from connected vehicles—Allstate could see when, how far, and for how long someone was driving, along with “hard braking events” and “whether a consumer picked up or opened their phone while traveling at certain speeds.”

Texas’ lawsuit claims that Arity incentivized—through “generous bonus incentives”—apps like GasBuddy, a gas price-tracking app, and Life360, which is intended to keep tabs on family members’ location, to “increas[e] the size of their dataset.” Under their agreements with app makers, Arity had “varying levels of control over the privacy disclosures and consent language” shown to app users, according to the complaint.

And now for the doublespeak:

“Arity helps consumers get the most accurate auto insurance price after they consent in a simple and transparent way that fully complies with all laws and regulations.”

But they’re not the only villains in this piece:

The suit also cites Allstate as gathering direct car use data from Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati, and Ram vehicles.

And if these assholes shared data with Allstate, you can bet your house that they did so with other insurance companies too.

If you’re not into letting corporations do this to you:

…you may want to avoid any dealings at all with these bastards.  It’s not like Stellantis (Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati) are reporting a boom in sales, after all.

When the Texans win their suit, at it should, I would argue against fines because those bastards will just pass the cost into their customers and claim a tax deduction at worst.

What I would do as TxAG is get a list of all Texans with Allstate policies, and demand that Allstate provide free insurance to them for a period of time commensurate with the start date of Arity’s snoopery.

I know, that would just cause Allstate to cease operations in Texas.  That’s fine, too — take away access to the second-largest pool of drivers in the U.S.