Somedays, I think that a Soviet-like command economy might be better than our market economy, even with the gulags, bread lines, and state media, where propaganda and ballet were the main offerings.
This thought always comes to mind when telephoning the customer service department of some big, faceless company.  If a market economy is supposed to bring us choices and drive companies with bad service out of business, then why do they all have the same lousy customer service when we call them?
The standard recorded message goes like this:

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Thank you for calling the XYZ Company.  We know that you must have a serious problem to have phoned us, a problem that you couldn’t get resolved with our on-line customer service feature or via our automated phone feature with its 18 prompts.
It’s amazing that you even found our phone number on our website, as we try to hide it from valued customers like you.
Recognizing that you’re probably very frustrated right now, our goal is to frustrate you so much more that you turn into a raving lunatic, or an English soccer fan, which is one and the same.  If at any time you begin to feel homicidal during this call, please enter “9-1-1” or say “nine-one-one.”
To protect your security and privacy, please say or enter your Social Security number, which will immediately be harvested by a hacker in China.  Then enter your eight-digit password, followed by the maiden name of your great-grandmother and the size of the tires on your first car.
When a human finally comes on the phone in ten minutes, she will ask for this information again but won’t understand you, because she is located in a foreign country.  You could save yourself this aggravation if you hang up and go to our on-line help service at PavlovsDog@xyz.com.

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If you think the foregoing is an exaggeration, consider my recent experience with xfinity (Comcast).
I called Comcast because my monthly cable bill was inexplicably $10.14 higher than the previous bill.  This triggered a similar ordeal to the one above, but with one difference:   The automated prompt generator asked if I wanted to see my bill on my TV.  I said, “NO!”
A couple of seconds later, my wife, who was watching a critical putt at the U.S. Open golf tournament, said, “Honey, why is our xfinity bill on the TV?”  At that moment, a human customer service rep came on the phone.  After asking for my Social Security number, password, and sexual preferences, she said, “How can I help you?”
“Well,” I responded, “the first thing you can do is tell me how to get the bill off my TV screen, as the remote won’t do it.”  She answered, “You’ll have to unplug your receiver, wait a few seconds, and then plug it back in so that it reboots in a few minutes.”
Unbeknownst to her, the word “reboots” had given me an idea of how I could reuse an old pair of combat boots that I’ve been keeping since my Army days.  But fortunately for her, I was too much of a gentleman to ask her if she could bend over and touch her toes.  Besides, it wasn’t her fault that she worked for a company where the clueless executives should be the ones bending over to touch their toes so they could be booted.
Anyway, she went on to explain that the extra $14.10 was due to the expiration of a promotion that my wife and I had been given when we signed up for Comcast a year earlier.  Knowing that cable companies were losing customers because of cable cutting, I asked her to please reinstate the promotion so that we didn’t have to cancel our service.  She agreed.
Comcast blew it twice.  First, they could’ve gained a lot of goodwill by having a note in the bill that the promotion had expired but they were going to renew it so that a good customer didn’t have to pay more for cable service.  Second, instead of doing this, they made me jump through hoops, as if my time is less valuable than theirs.
The next day I had to call an investment company that is a household name.  A sizable IRA of mine has been with them for many years.  The call was necessary because a beneficiary change I wanted to make could not be done on line.  To my dismay, I found out that they had changed their security protocol for telephone calls.  They still asked for my Social Security number, “for my protection.” But now they were switching to a voice-recognition security system.  Accordingly, the customer service rep asked me to speak while feigning a Chinese accent, so the system would think it was me when Yoo Wang called to clean out the account.
The last sentence is a joke—maybe.
On a serious note, if I were to die, how would my wife get through to customer service as a beneficiary, given that she doesn’t sound like me?
At least Amazon doesn’t put customers through telephone hell.  When I had a problem that couldn’t be resolved on line, I looked for five minutes on Amazon’s website for a number to call.  I finally gave up after realizing that if they wanted calls from customers, they would have put the number front and center on their website.
Like other on-line retailers, Amazon does excel at something.  It excels at barraging customers with emails after a purchase, suggesting related products that they can buy.  Without their help, I never would’ve known that I should wear underwear with athletic shorts.
Call me old-fashioned, but I dearly miss the old days of being known by the proprietor of a neighborhood retail store.  For example, when I was a kid and my dad ran out of cigarettes, he’d send me down to the corner market to get a pack.  “My dad needs a pack of cigs,” I’d say to the proprietor.  He’d respond, “Camels, right?”  I never bought a pack for myself, because if I dared to smoke, several neighbors would’ve have seen me and called my parents before I got home.
Today, big corporations that don’t know me and don’t give a damn about me know everything about me.  It’s as if they took a page from the East German Stasi.