Marshall Brain's Blog

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Billing for Wasted Time 2

Back in August I ran a post titled Billing for wasted Time. The point was that companies are wasting more and more of our time, whether its making us stand in hour-long lines, or making us wait for an hour on hold for tech support, or making us jump through hoops for hours to get money we are rightfully owed. If we got reimbursed for that wasted time, this time-wasting phenomenon would stop.

This week there is an editorial in the NY Times talking about the same phenomenon: Customer-Service Cluelessness. Pogue calls it the "new American business model: passive-aggressive robbery." One of his examples is Verizon, where he calls multiple times to get a billing error corrected, and it never is corrected.

He notes: "Either there’s a plague of cluelessness sweeping the country’s customer-service systems, or a sinister, sneaky sort of thievery is going on. The worst part is that there’s no satisfaction in catching the culprits and calling them on it—because your time is worth something, too, and you don’t get any reimbursement for that."

What if we did get reimbursed for it?

The situation as it stands now is simple -- corporations know that if they put up time-wasting walls, most people will give up and the corporation can keep the money. Reimbursement for wasted time is the easiest way to take those walls down.