Everyone has heard of sleeper cells. They are the human equivalent of mines or depth charges, explosive devices just waiting to go off. In this case, enemy agents posing as regular folks until activated. The Soviets next door in “The Americans” or the San Bernardino shooters. But his sort of thing is far from our daily lives. Or is it?
We are surrounded by sleeper cells in our possessions, bobby traps lying in wait for the unsuspecting consumer. Way back when, we were warned about planned obsolescence. These were lemons–in-waiting that fell to pieces about the time your warranty expired. That was primitive. Today’s cruel jokes on the unwary are much more sophisticated.
The high-mileage, low-pollution Volkswagen diesel that was too good to be true is the poster child for the new breed of bad behavior. As all the world now knows, the same sort of clever engineers that brought us the V2 and Zyklon-B contrived the software to turn on the Volkswagen’s pollution control devices if, and only if, the cars were being tested for toxic emissions. As soon as they passed that test, they went back to spewing pollutants and getting better mileage and performance as a result. It seemed like a perfect car — economical, clean, efficient, and zippy.
As in a Ponzi scheme, this was a license to print Euros until somebody noticed the game was rigged. Then head rolled, the stock price crashed, sales plummeted, the brand was poisoned and governments and class action lawyers began circling the wounded beasts like hungry buzzards, all avid to sue for billions and send the crooks to jail. Oops.
More insidious is something like the HP 6700 printer of one of which I am a disgruntled owner. Thanks, Carly. It has a black ink cartridge and three color ink cartridges. I never print anything in color, yet it keeps running out of color ink. I wouldn’t care except it is designed to refuse to print in any color until the empty cartridge is replaced. What gives?
Turns out the machine automatically cleans its heads with a squirt of ink every time you turn it on, which can add up to a lot of ink of all colors used for purposes other than printing. The satanic device also adds a squirt of yellow every time it prints in black, so the unsuspecting owner ends up replacing yellow cartridges he thinks he isn’t using as often as the black cartridges he is using.
This sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident. Wicked engineers designed the system to maximize sales of ink. The low-cost printers are just the latest version of a venerable gimmick. The oil industry was founded on the kerosene lamp. Early on, some genius realized that if you gave the lamps away for practically nothing the customers for the fuel would buy and buy and buy. King Gillette did the same thing with cut rate razors to lock in a permanent demand for the blades.
Once you start looking, this sort of trick handcuff customers to company is ubiquitous. Banks give good customers a free safety deposit box to lock in their accounts for the long run. Cable companies give you a cut rate on a DVR so you keep subscribing to their service. Videogame consoles and smart phones are sold at a discount to assure a large customer base for the games or the monthly charges.
It is often a short step from these incentives to a darker sort of predation. Time-Warner adds pay channels I never ordered to my bill, and unless you read it line-by-line each month, you may not notice for years that you’re buying something you didn’t want, never use and didn’t agree to buy in the first place. Cons like this rely on the inertia and inattentiveness of their customers.
The modern world is awash with the subscription model. Newspapers and magazines, record and book clubs once thrived by enrolling lots of subscribers with bargain rates. When the rates rose, many would quit but a profitable percent would remain – partly because the service was relatively cheap and automatic, and partly because they made the process of unsubscribing as miserable as possible. Now this sort of thing is everywhere. You’ve got to pay the bills each month for water, electricity and the phone. Then the cable bill was added. And now there are Amazon Prime, Netflix, Costco and on and on.
The computer world has proliferated the annual or semi-annual update. One fine day, the old version of software you have come to rely on, from evil Microsoft or Quicken or the virus catchers, no longer works as it did the day before. And it won’t be updated unless you cross the corporate palm with silver. It’s as if your hammer or ax or saw wouldn’t work anymore unless you bought a periodic update from the manufacturers.
When I was young, you went to the doctor or dentist only when you were near death or writhing in pain because the price came out of your pocket. Now we and our teeth and our eyes and our ears have annual physicals, but so do our homes and machines. The furnace and air conditioning guy. The car’s required tune. The bug man’s seasonal visit. And so, ad infinitum. What’s a consumer to do?
There are three choices. One, become a crank, perpetually saddling up for quixotic crusades against the forces of darkness. But tilting at windmills only has a happy ending in YA novels where teens or hobbits save the world from evil. Two, supinely bend the knee to our corporate overloads. We are outmanned and outgunned and sooner or later they will have all our money. Three is: Do without. Jesus and St. Francis, Buddha, Thoreau and Gandhi managed to get through life without becoming revenue streams for the makers of their machines and toys and electronic amusements. But I fear they were better men than you or I. We want our MTV. Not to mention our iPhone 6 with the behemoth data plan. In other words, as Texas Guinan used to say to her customers, “Hello, Suckers.”