When I was nineteen years old, I worked at a medium-sized tech company that had a contract with the US Navy offering various IT services. My job was working the phones, resetting passwords, and guiding members of the military to different websites to obtain records. It wasn’t a great job, but it was stress-free, and I really grew a lot in the short time I worked there.
One day, rumors began circling that the company had been purchased by a much larger company. Within a few days, there were representatives from the new company hanging banners and giving speeches about how nothing would change, no one was going to lose their jobs, and everyone should rest easily. I distinctly remember him saying, “The only thing that is going to change is the name of the company on your paycheck.”
Two weeks after the buyout was complete, I found myself called into a normally abandoned office a few hallways over. The door was open and inside, someone had placed a small desk, and five different people stood huddled around the desk. I knew it wasn’t good.
Despite the reassurances, all the talk about this simply being a merger and not a buyout, and how our jobs were safe, several of us received our final checks that day. It was a gut punch and I learned an important life lesson that day. Companies lie, and companies don’t have morals. They don’t care about you, and you are dispensable the moment it benefits the bottom line.
This concept should not be a surprise to anyone these days, where mass layoffs are circulated online and big companies tell regulators all the time that nothing will change and then once they are cleared they immediately do exactly what the regulators were concerned with. It’s no longer something that happens behind closed doors, it’s something out there for the whole world to see.
The one thing that has changed over the past twenty years since my unexpected layoff is our relationships with companies. Almost every company has a sort of tribal fandom behind it, whether it’s the phone you use, the video game system you play, the beer you drink, or the sports team you watch. These companies exploit this “love” and “relationship with the fans” with a pretend dialogue that exists in the form of marketing. Their social media presence, the big presentations to announce new products, the t-shirts, stickers, subscription services, and the list goes on and on. These companies are great at making you feel like you are in a reciprocal relationship where you give them part of your paycheck (preferably monthly) in exchange for them caring about what you want. Of course, if you think they actually care about your opinion, then you are naive, as I was when that person told me no one was going to get let go.
As our culture continues to embrace outrage, I find it exhausting at times reading tech/entertainment news online. One week folks are unhappy with Apple because the iPhone didn’t innovate enough, the next week folks are upset that AI is stealing IPs, the next week Microsoft is price gouging and laying folks off. Around and around in circles we go, discussing, analyzing, offering opinions, and protesting because this company or that company because they no longer act exactly the way we want it to. We take it personally, when we spent twenty-five years as an Xbox Fanboy and Microsoft doubles down on being greedy. We hate that Apple locks us into their ecosystem, when they’ve been doing it from the start, and now a quarter of your digital life is difficult to separate from the company you proudly stuck a sticker on your car. The problem is… you, and me, we’re suckers. There was no relationship. The idea that owning this made you techy or that made you cool was all an illusion created in a tiny office by a marketing company.
It’s time to stop associating the bright colors and clean logos with companies and start imagining them for what they truly are, establishments created to offer you a product in exchange for your money at any means possible. At the end of the day, the president of any CEO looks at his stock price, not his customer appreciation score, and that is what takes precedent. Your appreciation only matters when money begins to be lost.
Here’s a great example:
In the 90s, NASCAR was the fastest growing sport in America. This once regional racing series began crossing over with the mainstream as driver Jeff Gordon hosted Saturday Night Live and Dale Earnhardt showed up in a Looney Tunes movie. Demand for NASCAR led track developers to begin building tracks in major markets such as Chicago, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Plans for a track on Staten Island circulated for years, as well as Seattle. As NASCAR chased the larger dollars of mainstream America and major metropolitan areas, tracks that had been around for decades began dropping off the schedule. How was North Wilkesboro or Rockingham, North Carolina supposed to compete with the lights of the Vegas Strip?
NASCAR did everything in its power to shake off it’s Southern roots. The cars were redesigned, so much so that they no longer resembled stock cars. The races moved from smaller channels with Southern ties like TNN and TBS to network TV. They changed their normal Championship system to feature a playoff system to generate bigger ratings. NASCAR, a family run company, severed all ties with their history to chase bigger profits, and it worked for a few years. Then those old fans, the ones who had been around since the beginning, those generational fans who grew up watching races with their fathers and grandfathers began tuning out. NASCAR didn’t care, because they had new fans with larger incomes, but as the product began to dilute, they also began tuning out. For them, they had only been watching a few years, so it wasn’t something ingrained into their culture. It was just a short flirtation with something different on TV.
Now, twenty years later, there is no track in LA. North Wilkesboro and Rockingham are back on the schedule. Darlington, another legacy track that lost one of its races, now has a second race again, as NASCAR has done it’s best to court back those millions of viewers from the 80s and 90s who no longer watch. I read something the other day that said their marketing for next year is all about “back-to-roots”
At first glance, when you feel like you are in a relationship with a company, this feels like a genuine way to walk back mistakes made two decades ago. It’s an apology of, “Oh, I should have never taken you for granted.” But if you step back, you can see it for exactly what it is. It’s a desperate attempt to boost their ratings, which have declined dramatically. It’s an attempt to capture lightning in a bottle once more, as NASCAR’s culture relevance is at an all-time low. Not only have racetracks closed over the last few years, but tracks have also had to remove significant amounts of seats just so the races don’t appear empty on TV. “Back-to-roots” could be better said as “back to profit levels of the 90s.”
So yea, NASCAR is pretending like it’s “heard the fans” but in reality, it’s looked at its profit and loss statement, because at the end of the day, NASCAR nor any company doesn’t care about you or me, they care about profits.
Here’s the thing, ranting and raving online isn’t going to change anything. In today’s world, everyone has an opinion on everything (a curse, I might add) and companies hear it from all sides, all day long. It’s impossible to measure what the fans truly want by listening to folks online, because everyone is quick to protest everything. When you protest all the time, it stops becoming effective and simply becomes annoying. So, do the one thing that corporations can measure, stop buying their products. Don’t subscribe, don’t upgrade, and shake off the fanboy or fangirl label. If you don’t like something, don’t use it. Hurt them where it matters, because they don’t give a crap about your feelings, how long you’ve been a loyal customer, nor your opinion.
