Your Call Is Important To Us (23 page)

Sam makes his business sound customer-centric and employee-friendly. And though Walton was a union-buster, it seems that the old duffer really did make nice with his partners on his frequent visits to Wal-Mart stores. Since Sam’s death in 1992, though, the Son of Sam Wal-Mart has become increasingly ruthless with its suppliers, employees, and competitors. The Wal-Mart way goes a little something like this. Squeeze your suppliers for their lowest prices, and then underprice all the local competition. Once everyone else goes out of business, raise your prices. Simple as a dimple, ain’t it? The fancy antitrust law name for this sort of thing is predatory pricing. One study by an Iowa economist estimated that when Wal-Mart came to the state, Iowa lost half of its clothing stores, 40 percent of its variety stores, 25 percent of its department stores, and 30 percent of its hardware stores. Another study by a New York state advocacy group estimated that for every lousy job a Wal-Mart created, one and a half local jobs were lost. Other retailers can try to compete with Wal-Mart, but they usually do so by specializing and gentrifying. This is why you can buy any number of charming tchtochkes and upscale wares from specialized retailers downtown, but you can’t find basic household goods like a mop or dishes or sheets to save your life. The only place you can get that kind of stuff is a big-box, or the mall.

As for all that “Made in America” flag-waving, most Wal-Mart products aren’t. Remember Kathie Lee, mascara-smeared and penitent, when she discovered her awful leisure wear was lovingly stitched by underpaid foreign children? Those togs were on sale at Wal-Mart, and they’re still shilling the best glad rags that sweatshops have to offer. Wal-Mart is one of the largest importers of sweatshop products from Central America and Asia. Wal-Mart imported $15 billion worth of merchandise from China alone in 2004, comprising more than 10 percent of the U.S. trade deficit with China. Wal-Mart has also been ordering suppliers with manufacturing operations based in more expensive locales to relocate to China, if they wish to continue doing business with the company.

Wal-Mart’s latest move is into the grocery industry, as their new Superstores feature a full grocery store, nestled among all the other merchandise. These Superstores have made Wal-Mart America’s biggest grocer, and its third biggest pharmacy. Grocery employee unions have been howling about how the incursion of the big-boxes is closing down regional chains and making their living-wage jobs a thing of the past. Wal-Mart’s move into the grocery industry has already destroyed dozens of midsized regional supermarket chains. Wal-Mart is also considering used-car dealerships in their parking lots. It’s not enough that they sell a goodly chunk of America’s household goods. They want to sell you your food as well, and the car you use to drive the lot home. They’ve also started filing applications to get involved in the financial services industry. Some Wal-Marts carry money orders, and they are itching to get their hands on your mortgage, too. Just imagine the Wal-Mart of the glorious future: you can work there, bank there, and buy everything you need there. Hooray, one-stop shopping! Just like the Company Store! It’s sooo convenient.

Walton urges businessmen to think small, which hardly sounds convincing coming from a man who started a very big chain of very big stores. But it’s true. You can chuckle at the cheerleading and the greeters, but that little shred of Ma and Pa Kettle–style retailing that Wal-Mart clings to, for all its technological advancement and enormousness, is one of the reasons why it is such a success. Why, y’aren’t standin’ in a detachment of the world’s most voracious retail behemoth! No, this is your community store. The key is to fake small, to try to make every interaction with the customer seem cozy and personal. Wal-Mart’s ad campaigns feature “local” folks, from wherever the ads air. Some of these just plain folks are Wal-Mart employees, and others are satisfied customers, but they are always doing something perfectly ordinary: A middle-aged couple gardens, a couple of college gals spruce up their dorm room, a family gets ready for their new baby, all with Wal-Mart’s invaluable aid. This is cheaper than hiring some big-name celebrity, and it also strikes the appropriate folksy, local note. There are a million different cheesy motivational manuals about customer service, but success ultimately comes down to creating the illusion that the transaction is all about you. Through copious lashings of advertising, and by training employees to kiss every ass that comes through the door, stores endeavor to convince you that every rinky-dink chunk of mass-produced bric-a-brac was manufactured expressly for you, the almighty customer.

The Wal-Mart smocks used to read, “Our people make the difference,” in keeping with Sam’s boosterish employee relations style. Now they read, “How may I help you?,” which may well be, and I type this heaving a sigh, the most oft-repeated question of our time. It’s certainly way ahead of “To be, or not to be?” And the world would be the portrait of Christian charity if people meant help like actual help whenever they said it, but the phrase actually means something more like “May I fetch you another product or service, my liege?” Because, see, it’s all about you, you customer you. The elastic-waist slacks are for you, the pills are for you, the patio furniture is for you, wonderful you.

The retail and service sectors have to make it seem like it is all about you to get your business, but getting your business is all about them. For all the small talk, at the new Son of Sam Wal-Mart, the goal is bigger, faster, and more. They used to open a store every couple of days. Now they’re trying to do one a day, all over the world. They’ve been putting them up in Europe and Latin America, and are also wooing that awakening Chinese market, a drool-inducing prospect for any merchandiser . . . mmmm, billions of big-box virgins, who have never known the full flower of Western retail . . . mmmm. All the big stores, all the category killers, work the same way. They’re fiercely competitive—within themselves. Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and The Home Depot routinely open branches within a few miles or meters of each other and let them sell each other to the death. Once they destroy the local competition by saturating the market, and identify which of their own outlets has the best turnover, they close the less successful outlets and redirect the traffic to the winning stores.

Walton dismissed the claim that his chain has slaughtered small-town Ma and Pa Kettle retailers, and guffawed at the notion that they should be protected, like endangered whooping cranes. Sam preferred to highlight the billions he’s saved Americans by offering low, low prices. I love the way he, and all Wal-Mart’s defenders, deploy this savings argument—by spending billions of dollars at Wal-Mart, you’ve actually conserved billions. The only problem with this kind of feel-good math is that the only saved billions in evidence are those in the Wal-Mart bank accounts. You simply cannot save more money by buying lots of things, even if you’re buying cheaper things. Even though Wal-Mart is praised by free-marketeers for bringing down the price of household goods, those low, low prices have only encouraged people to buy more shit. Wal-Mart is an expert in the art of impulse merchandising. You go in for a mop, and you leave with a bunch of other stuff, because it’s all right there. The effectiveness of this particular savings plan is clear; most households are, if not drowning, at least wallowing in consumer debt, and the savings rate remains negative. If folks are saving a couple of bucks on their mops and what-not, they are certainly not banking any of those gains, unlike the billion-stashing beast of Bentonville.

It’s not just that we’re stark-raving shopaholics, though we most certainly are. Nor is it simply that we are buying more of our goods from large, distant concerns that do jack for our local economies. Fast-food outlets and big-box stores act as a drag on revenues for most cities and municipal regions since they entail road and service costs and contribute little to the tax base. In fact, a Democratic staff report for the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimates that a Wal-Mart store with two hundred staffers ends up costing the government more than $400,000 in low-income tax credits and health and housing subsidies. Way to externalize. The really swell news about the new service economy is that serving and waiting are what most of us will be doing for a living. The service industry and retail sales, both denizens of the sprawl, are two of the biggest employers in the United States, and will continue to lead job growth for the next decade or so.

The service industry, which includes everything from restaurant and motel workers to health care helpers and janitors, is the fastest-growing sector, and should continue to lead job growth until 2010, according to the National Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Bureau puts together a report called the Occupational Outlook Handbook, which goes by the delightful acronym of OOH, where they predict what jobs will be big over the next decade. And in keeping with that whole increasing economic inequality thing, there are two trends at work. There will be a greater demand for professional and managerial types. As the boomers age and retire, new suits will be needed to fill the ranks, and we’ll need heaps of teachers and nurses too. But the greatest job growth will be on the plains of service, not in the citadels of management. The top ten jobs for the next decade are:

1. Combined food preparation and service, including fast food

2. Customer service representatives

3. Registered nurses

4. Retail salespersons

5. Computer support specialists

6. Cashiers, except gaming

7. Office clerks, general

8. Security guards

9. Computer software engineers

10. Waiters and waitresses

OOH, indeed. This is a list you should show the kids. Might as well break it to them sooner, rather than later. And what would you like to be when you grow up, Timmy? An astronaut? Silly Timmy! Why, there are only a couple of hundred astronauts in the whole wide world, little guy. Be realistic. Why not try a rewarding career as a customer service representative, inbound calls only? Beats hell out of steaming in grease at Mickey D’s!

The only gigs on that list that pay worth a damn are the two computer things and the nursing gig. The service industry does offer a slightly better rate of pay than the retail average of just above minimum wage, but this depends on what type of service you perform. Some service jobs are unionized, and the Service Employees International Union, which has 1.8 million members in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico, is one of the fastest-growing labor organizations in America. However, most of the workers in the retail trade and service industries are not unionized. And those cushy computer jobs are the latest to be outsourced to cheaper foreign workers, which is driving the wages of geekdom down. The vast majority of people who work in fields like retail and food service make wages near the legal minimum.

I am quite sure that you have a good idea of what services fast-food workers perform—the frying, the nuking, the smiling. You may have even worn the ceremonial smock and hairnet yourself at one point or another. The customer service representative, number two on the OOH, is a slightly more enigmatic creature. Customer service representative is a catch-all term that encompasses service over the Internet and phone. There are more than 50,000 call centers in America, and they employ about 3 million people. Those are necessarily rough estimates, as call centers tend to experience very high levels of employee turnover. The average employment stint at a call center is a year and a half. This is doubtless due to the fact that call center jobs, for all that they may have a sheen of white-collar office gentility, are usually stressful and boring.

There are two different branches of call center work, the outbound and the inbound. Inbound calls only, a real selling point in call center classifieds, means that you will only have to take calls from customers who want to hear from you. Outbound means sales, or telemarketing, which means getting hung up on and berated. Be they inbound or outbound, most call centers are simply phone-answering factories, hotbeds of psycho-Taylorist efficiency. Employees usually work in one large space, headsetted before their pods, cubicled a few feet away from each other. A fascinating article in
Call Center Magazine
enthuses about the fact that you can pack twice as many workers into a call center space than into a traditional office. In a regular office, zoning laws insist that you need to have 1,000 square feet for every four people, but in a call center you can cram eight phone jockeys in the same amount of space. In a pleasant bit of new economy synergy, the article also recommends decommissioned Wal-Marts—there are hundreds to choose from—as an excellent, economical venue for your call center.

The biggest problem with the way call centers are currently run is that performance tends to be measured by quantity, rather than quality. Call turnover is a lot easier to track than customer satisfaction. While supervisors are encouraged to listen in on calls, and most recordings warn that your call may be monitored for quality control, it is far easier to judge CSRs on speed than on the finer points of service. The more calls CSRs take, and the quicker they take them, the better they do. Even in call centers that involve service rather than sales, workers may be required to fill call quotas, or stick to scripts, and are discouraged from tarrying with any one customer. Consequently, the employee who dispatches with several complaints quickly by failing to fix or know anything actually performs better than the employee who takes the time to investigate your problem.

I did an unscientific poll of my own and asked a friend who works for a bank call center to count how many calls he took during an eight-hour shift. He took eighty-seven calls that shift and described the day as not particularly busy, just steady, and eighty calls per shift often comes up as a sort of call center industry standard. A busy day would be more like twenty calls an hour. All the whip-cracking and chop-chop is because employee time is money. One way to cut these labor costs is to hire people in other regions where labor is cheaper—like jail. Prisons are good sites for your call center. UNICOR, otherwise known as Federal Prison Industries, calls itself “the best-kept secret in outsourcing,” noting that prison labor rates are competitive with offshore hubs like India, and that prisoners have the added advantage of familiar accents. However, there have been some concerns about allowing convicted felons to get their hands on data like phone and credit card numbers, so even companies like TWA that use prison labor to staff call centers tend not to brag about it.