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In the business lexicon I think polite somehow equals naive or stupid. Neil Macdonald examines some of the hi-jinks our corporate leadership in Canada feels it can get away with.
“A letter arrived last week from TD Bank. “In order to continue to meet your banking needs …” it began.
Try to guess what came next. Hint: I’m a customer at a Canadian bank.
Sure enough, “We sometimes need to adjust our pricing.”
Unsurprisingly, the prices being adjusted were not being adjusted downward.
As of March, the bank’s “non-TD ATM fee” is being raised 33 per cent.
Fees for cancelling an Interac e-transfer and for holding a post-dated cheque at a branch are going from free to $5. And the fee for transferring a tax-free savings account to another bank is going from free to $75.
These are huge increases, far in excess of growth or individual spending power.
Now, it’s important to understand TD’s position. The bank’s profits were $8.02 billion last year, up only slightly from $7.88 billion the year before.”
Our banks do this sorta shit all the time. Hmm..bottom line looking a bit thin? Let’s put the screw to our customers, they’ll smile and say ‘thank-you’.
“It’s worth noting, though, that in the U.S., where TD is now a serious player, with more branches than in Canada, the bank plans to impose no fee increases on customers come March.
“Totally different environment,” a TD spokeswoman told me.
Translation: There’s a lot more competition there, and if TD tried charging the sorts of fees it imposes on the bank’s supine Canadian flock, some other U.S. bank would be in there siphoning off business before you could say “special offer.”
Up here in Canada, TD’s letter advises customers that if they don’t want to accept the fee hikes, they are free to close their accounts, “without cost or penalty.”
Generous, that.”
It is really as simple as that? Because we in Canada don’t allow the wild west capitalism that typifies our good neighbours to the south we have to accept the fact that the fox is in charge of the henhouse?
“It’s all part of being Canadian. The equation is simple: Canadian consumers and workers are protected from certain free-market excesses, but that coddled security comes with a price: oligopolies, in which a few firms dominate, and all the behaviour that flows from that.”
If this is the price we have to pay to be able to weather the financial shit-storms that brew in the US, I might be able to accept that – but I think that the cost benefit analysis is still up for debate.
“If you want a really depressing bit of Canadian reading, go look at the Canadian Competition Bureau’s policy on “price maintenance,” something most of us know as “price-fixing.”
Certain companies, especially in the luxury trade, try to see to it that their products never go on sale. Rolex is one. Canada Goose, the world-famous Canadian parka-maker, is another.
This offends capitalism: in a free market, one of the few responsibilities of government is to monitor and punish efforts to deaden competition”
Looking at you telecoms :/
“In fact, “price maintenance behaviour” was a criminal act in Canada, until Stephen Harper’s Conservatives changed the law in 2009 (though some forms of price-fixing still remain a crime).
The new law reduced price maintenance to a non-criminal offence, and even at that, it now has to be proven that “price maintenance conduct has had, is having or is likely to have an adverse effect on competition in a market.”
In other words, the government has to prove that price fixing results in fixed prices.”
Another gifted poison pill from our beloved former conservative government. It is shit like this that ruins their airs toward being business friendly and being friends of the market and all of the other hooey they exude from their weaselly mouths. They lay down on market policy that hugely distorts the market – and in the end makes Canadians pay more – and then have the audacity to make ‘sad face’ and shrug their shoulders laying the blame on the ‘free market’. Conservative economic policy is made of pure unadulterated rannygazoo from top to bottom.
“After trying to make sense of the gibberish on its website, I asked the Competition Bureau how many times it’s gone after companies for what it calls price maintenance since it issued its new “enforcement guidelines” in 2014.
The answer: None. Zero.
“Nevertheless,” said a spokeswoman in an email, Canadians should rest assured the bureau remains vigilant: “The Competition Bureau will not hesitate to take appropriate action where it believes price maintenance has occurred.”
Okay. Good to know.”
*sigh* – WTG Competition Bureau. :/
Free markets make for a level playing field, ensuring the best products get to the consumers at the lowest price by rewarding hard working people who go the extra mile to bring the people what they want….except when someone other than the established upper class might take some of their wealth away. Then “free” markets make laws to ban that shit immediately.
The illusion that capitalism benefits anyone other than the haves over the have-nots is laid bare once again, this time in the automotive industry. Recently there have been two articles about Tesla Motors at wired.com that caught my interest.
For those who haven’t heard of them, Tesla makes electric cars that actually look cool. That whole ‘you gotta be some kind of nerdy hipster to do away with gas guzzlers’ thing? Tesla says “Fuck that shit. Our cars will not only run on batteries, they will also look so awesome that autophiles will bust a nut at the sight of them.” Currently they cater a relatively wealthy demographic, but they are continually getting closer to producing an electric car that the masses could feasibly acquire.
The first article looks at how maintaining an electric vehicle requires so much less than a traditional gas car. No oil, pistons, air filters, pumps, belts, spark plugs, or any of that myriad of other bits and pieces that car garages charge you through the nose to look after for you. All this makes other car dealers very unhappy. These problems that Tesla is trying to make better is how car shops make money. In their eyes, selling the public a sub-standard product is preferable as it will ensure years of expensive repairs. On top of that, Tesla is offering flat rate plans for what little maintenance one might need for their electric car, rather than charging for each and every little thing they do. If the public ever got used to ideas like that, it would be the end of both seedy garages that will screw you out of a couple hundred bucks as well as the posh dealership garages that will screw you out of thousands.
The second article looks at how Tesla sells its vehicles. Apparently Tesla is trying to make the process of buying a car not suck gangrenous donkey sack. By selling only direct over the internet, Tesla stores are located in malls, not lots; staffed with informative promoters, not pushy salesmen; providing a consistent experience across stores, not a terrifying crap shoot. Taking away the dealership middleman may make things fantastically better for the customer, but threatens another crux of the established car industry. Oh the horror! If this catches on, people would stop putting up with manipulative pressuring assholes car salespeople, who would then, in turn, have to get some other job.
So this all sounds great. A new age of cleaner cars, better buying experiences, and a substantial drop in the sleaziness that the average person is exposed to. Except that the only losers in this scenario, the car dealers, have lots and lots of money. Enough money to buy big powerful lobbyists. But but we live in democracy with a free market, right? Whatever. People with money say no go. New Jersey has now banned Tesla stores, as car dealer lobbyists insist that Tesla’s better way of doing things gives them an unfair advantage. Legal battles like this are happening in many other places across the states.
A very grim and cynical part of me thinks it’s hilarious when capitalism advocates point at the corruptibility and horror of other economic systems. All the “free” market does is allow oppressors to pretend that they have earned the right to screw over the masses. Once stymying collective progress becomes easier and/or more profitable than short term individual gains, that invisible hand is much more likely to be used to beat down the public, rather than be any kind of positive force.
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