Keep your hands off the thermostat

By Ivan Morgan \ April 28, 2023

I was walking through Staples with an employee. I needed an ink cartridge for my printer, and as they have a wall with 50,000 different ones (or so it seems to me) I asked a young fellow to find it for me. As we wandered through the aisles, I mentioned it was kind of chilly in the store, maybe whoever’s in charge should crank up the heat.

He looked at me and laughed. The thermostats, he said, were controlled in Montreal.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but corporate control has been creeping up on all of us for some time. A good example is the self-checkout. We are told it is for our convenience, but it really is about the bottom line. Self-checkouts – I call them robots – can’t phone in sick, can’t unionize, don’t need a salary, health benefits, or paid vacations and require little to no management. They save companies a lot of money.

In case you haven’t noticed, those savings are not reflected in your grocery bill.

I read recently that some companies are pioneering the digital price tag. Stocking and pricing products are still labour-intensive jobs. If prices can be instantly reset from a keyboard somewhere, it saves the cost of pesky minimum wage employees and management costs.

At this rate someone may perfect the digital customer, and then you and I can go starve in the woods.

The self-checkout is all about diverting more money to the shareholders of the company. So is controlling the heat in a big box store 1,600 kilometres away. Or being able to change prices on shelves at the touch of a keyboard. It’s all about shaving as much as you can from operations to fatten profits. It’s not about better service or prices for you.

A type of business called private equity firms are busy behind the scenes buying up dental and veterinarian clinics across Canada. This is not the place for a lesson about them, you can google that. Suffice it to say they promise investors a high rate of return, then use their money to buy these clinics and set about wringing every last cent they can from their clients (that’s you). It’s not about service, it’s about profit. These companies slash staff and jack up bills to make as much profit as possible. The care you receive becomes very much more expensive. Gone is the bond between customer and client. Now there is a suit standing next to you both with his or her hand out.

In the United States studies have shown when private equity firms buy nursing homes, there is a decline in time spent with residents, fewer staff members, and lower-quality staff training.  And the death rate goes up 10 per cent. Nice.

Don’t look to government for solutions. They are looking to privatise all manner of things and divest themselves of their responsibilities – which judging by our current health care system they couldn’t manage in the first place.

All is not lost, however. The solution is easy and straightforward.

I think this latest bout of corporate greed is short-sighted. The people running these companies are not interested in the big picture, just the next quarterly financial returns. They are not interested in you.

Stop being interested in them. Every time you shop, buy goods or services, you vote with your dollars. If you don’t use these services, if the profit-obsessed executives are proven wrong, they will go away. 

The latest trend of rapacious corporate greed begins and ends with you. Don’t use a self-checkout. Don’t bring your business to a private equity-controlled business. Do a little research and find a clinic that’s owned and operated locally.

Wherever possible choose a local business who is rooted in your community. A place where the owner and the staff rely on you for their livelihood and appreciate that relationship. A place where the owner controls the thermostat.

Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com