Customer Service and Product Knowledge

Bob La Londe · 2011-06-25T18:06:07+00:00

When I was a kid every store and every distributor had people who not only knew what they had, but knew something about the product. Now you are lucky to reach a sales person or a customer service person you don't have to repeat the exact catalog number for or have look up more than two parts without getting irritated. Sigh!Example:Me: I see you have 43 end mills listed in your on-line catalog that meet these minimum specs. Can you punch in these specs and tell me which ones you stock in your local store?Them: Can you give me the catalog number on the part you are looking for?Sigh!Me: Ok, try this one. #xxxxxxxxx.Them: No, but we have it in our warehouse in China. I can have it for you in two weeks.Me: Ok, how about this one?Them: No, but we have it in our warehouse in China. I can have it for you in two weeks.Me: Ok, how about this one?Them: No, but we have it in our warehouse on the other coast. I can have it for you next week.Me: Can't you just punch in these criteria in your computer or walk out in the warehouse and see which ones you actually stock if any?Them: What is you are looking for?Me: Thank you for your help. Have a nice day. Click.Sigh.With so many unemployed you would think people might actually try to become knowledgeable and useful at their job. I tend to find myself preferring to order more and more often from companies who have an interactive inventory database tied into their computer, but even then its no guarantee that in stock means anywhere close. It just means you will eventually get the part.

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F. George McDuffee 15 years ago

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Is the answer a shift to a standard 30 or even 20 hour work week?

The fall in industrial employment even as the inflation adjusted production increases appears to be due to computerization and automation. Computerization leads to reductions white collar and managerial/supervisory employment, while automation/robotics slashes the need for blue color workers.

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While this may be very profitable *IN THE SHORT TERM* for the early adopters, this will have serious consequences in the long term as consumer spending accounts for about 70% of current GDP, and people earning minimum wages, no wages, or drawing unemployment are not a prime marketing demographic.

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John R. Carroll 15 years ago

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Ed Huntress 15 years ago

This has come up here before, and I've mentioned that this is exactly what some futurists were predicting back in the '60s and '70.

However, they were banking on the same thing that most economists assume: a rational market. People just don't think in terms of rational economic systems when they make their own individual plans.

The reaction I got, when I brought up this and related ideas from that school of thought, even to a top corporate economist, was that I just didn't "get it," that markets would expand forever, and that people displaced from manufacturing jobs would inevitably find other work that improved the overall GDP even further. This seemed to me at the time to be a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme. And now we're seeing the result.

I used to harp on the idea, only half-jokingly, that we were making so much stuff that we would eventually reach a natural limit when our houses could no longer hold it all. What I didn't count on was that there was a perfectly rational response to that problem. We just kept building bigger houses...

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Ed Huntress 15 years ago

Similar to that overall California report I posted above. California is doing roughly the same, or even better, than other large manufacturing states.

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That's a keeper.

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F. George McDuffee 15 years ago

for more on their predictions see

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As almost all economic systems are non/ir rational from time to time for varying lengths of time, it is only common sense to make your plans based on your own best long-term self interest as you perceive it.

As the old [reputable/ethical] stock brokers advised their clients during the booms and bubbles "trees don't grow to the sky."

Also see

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It does indeed appear that production overcapacity is a large part of the problem. For example, the automotive industry can currently produce at 100% utilization between

1_1/2 and two cars that can be sold AT A NORMAL PROFIT. Reduction in capacity by downsizing GM helped, but only a little, and as part of the economic development efforts in several states, additional automobile assembly plants are being constructed adding to the U.S. excess capacity problem. It would therefore seem only rational for Congress to prohibit the use of any federally controlled or guaranteed ED funds to construct any new automobile manufacturing facilities unless existing obsolescent facilities with the same production capacity are also scrapped/liquidated. When pigs fly.

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pyotr filipivich 15 years ago

Gunner Asch on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:19:35 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Not likely, but ... how many folks will decide that they have done all they can, but the banks haven't. Or the state? How many people will decide "I'm out of here..." and walk away and let the bank and the state eat it? Not many, I'm sure, but ... "but friends, what if fifty, I say if fifty people a day ... they might think it was a movement."

tschus pyotr

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CaveLamb 15 years ago

And rent storage rooms!

George Carlin needs a place for his Stuff...

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pyotr filipivich 15 years ago

Gunner Asch on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 23:17:49 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Interesting was reading the comments on a post about this. Some of the people were astonished that companies were moving to Arizona, which some of the commentators apparently thought was a bad place to do business. All I can think is what I said of some of the "less than optimal" places I've been "If this is the improved version, can you imagine the dump it used to be?"

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Larry Jaques 15 years ago

Yabbut, lots of that money is in big-ticket items, such as Boeings, F-16s, and Obamamobiles. One of those is exported for every 400 million of the chiwanese sub-dollar gadgets we import in its place. (or mebbe 20k of them for every Obamamobile)

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