Hope you all have chill holidays with your families. If you need some well presented and non-confrontational resources for why and how we can do better I'm a big fan of this guy's videos. Mom and dad might not listen, but cousins, nieces, and nephews might.
The Best Buy camera sales is a good example of why capitalism sucks. And they really do threaten employees into conforming to what they want.
I worked at a Wholesale Club in college, and twice a year they would have a "free trial" membership people could come in and get. They heavily advertised it. However, it was pretty much a bait and switch scheme. Our goal as employees were to not just get these people to by the membership when they came in as an upsale, but try to upsell to the highest membership level as well. We had conversion goals we needed to hit them if you worked at the membership / customer service desk (which was desirable because it's base pay was 50¢ an hour higher than other positions). And if we didn't hit our conversion goals there were retainings, action plans put in place and our performance reviews were "needs improvement". Which essentially meant we got didn't get a merit increase and the action plan we were placed on required us to hit your numbers within 90 days or we were terminated.
This essentially lead to high pressure sales where employees were making customers feel like they had no other option but to buy the membership if they wanted to shop today. It was better for the employee to make the customer "walk" (walk out the door and not buy a membership or get the free membership) than to give the customer the free membership. Some people were quick to walk, some people take no shit and tell it to you straight and end up the trial membership, because you know you need to give it to them or they will want to speak to the manager / call corporate which also gets the employee in trouble / affects their performance review. They been through the drill before, each time the free membership exists, always only get the free membership and wouldn't even let you give them the sales pitch in many cases. These people pretty much had a free membership half the year because they played the system. Never have paid for a membership, and never will.
That mean the people that were walking out the door and not getting either the free trial membership or a membership were likely their best bet for getting a conversion at the end of the trial membership and growing their membership base. Instead, these people were alienated, and likely won't come back. So not only were they out potential future members, but also all the sales of goods they would have gotten form that person during their 90 day free trial membership.
But this is what we had to do to hit the conversion goals. And the conversion goals were out of alignment with what was feasible. And this trend didn't help. Because if we hit our conversion goal, they just raised the conversion goal for the next trial membership program in 6 months...
If the conversion goal wasn't hit, they didn't lower it. At least not for multiple programs in a row didn't hit it and by then it's to late for any of the employees who had to obtain that unrealistic goal. They either quit because of the BS, or were terminated for not hitting their numbers.
Another good example of why capitalism sucks is when we look at services like Internet or TV.
In most of the world, if you have internet you only have one speed available to you and no data caps and overages. In the United States, internet is sold to you in several different speed tiers. They upsell you to get higher speed and more data per month. And the slower speeds are artificial restrictions put in place. Those artificial restrictions, slower traffic, are what clog the system. Thus the data caps. Instead of upgrading our infrastructure to handle more traffic, which costs money, and much of the traffic is clogs by the artificially slow traffic, we create data caps to limit usage and charge people more money who use the internet more. And don't get me started on overages. Comcast, in some markets, have set a data cap, where even with their highest plan, a family of 4 could never be cord cutters and go all streaming. Netflix alone for a family of 4 resulted in a surprise bill, $1200 in overages fees, in Atlanta when they first rolled out the data caps a few years back. These data caps also ensure, Comcast, who is also the cable provider, is the only real option for TV service.
Exploiting people and generating more revenue without upgrading service options is what capitalism does bast. And it may only get worse for us. Under the Trump administration the FCC rules were relaxed. And in US territories the cable companies have started segregating the internet into different bundles. You need to subscribe to things like "social media" or sites like Twitter and Facebook are blocked / not available. "Video" for YouTube and other streaming service and so on. All addons to the basic internet and cost more money. We could potentially see this in the United States. So far, we only have seen throttling. Yes, throttling. A few providers tier video streams with their plans. The lower plans only have SD, higher plan has HD and the highest plane has 4K. I'm not talking about Netflix doing this. I'm talking about if you get AT&T or Verizon unlimited home internet via hotspot. Whether this is your only option because you live in a rural area, or it's your only other option and you want to ditch the cable company.
Now let's look at broadcast TV. Most of Europe and Southeast Asia have moved on to 4k. And 8K rollout is well underway.
Here in the United States we haven't even started to roll out to 4k. In fact, it likely will not happen for decades without a government mandate. And this is because it costs money, and the broadcast networks have a responsibility to their shareholders. They just spent a lot of money upgrading to digital and HD less than 20 years ago. In their eyes, it makes no sense to have such a large expense again so soon. It's just not profitable. The digital / HD rollout was a government mandate, and even that was delayed from 2004 to 2008 because these private companies were so slow rolling it out citing the costs were prohibitory. And they had years to prepare for this.
All the big broadcast networks have stated at this time, they have no plans to upgrade 4k. That they will continue to use existing technologies and add new features such as HDR, which todays equipment can support without replacing. They said this more than 4 years ago. And there is zero movement on HDR. It's simply not happening at this time. They are not producing content with it, noor made the minor upgrades to their systems to allow it.
While it's true that some major sporting events are available in 4k, they are not broadcast in 4k. They are essentially a stream, IPTV actually. Some cable systems support this, and these streams are available only on their 4k capable boxes, as well as streaming platforms like YouTube TV. And a new channel is added just for the 1 game. And not everyone is doing it yet and options are real limited. For example, NBC did not do the super bowl in 4k this year, because they had all their 4k equipment at the winter olympics.
Another reason we won't see 4k tv anytime soon is cable and satellite companies. They are ever trying to squeeze more channels in, and a trend most of them are doing is downres. They are converting the 1080i HD broadcasts to 720p and heavily compressing them to fit more channels onto their network. Something they wouldn't need to do if they upgraded their systems to fiber optic, or converted all the channels to IPTV and use modern video codecs instead of MPEG. But that would mean replacing millions of cable boxes, so that's a no go... Yes, cable tv systems are mostly MPEG Layer II. A codec that has been in existence since 1991. There are some regions or areas that use MP4 video, or have some upper tier channels that are MP4 that require a special cable box (not their base box) toget. Broadcast TV also uses MPEG Layer II.
www.nbcnewyork.com
apple.news
www.theguardian.com
(meaningless, but funny)