Welcome to Corporate World

Sunday, September 19, 2004

COLUMN: Wayne M. O'Leary

My latest encounter with Corporate World was a run-in with Verizon, the communications giant that now supplies my local telephone service. The occasion was a minor phone disruption that entailed a call to the company's repair division. Not having recently dialed for any sort of assistance, I foolishly expected to speak with a human being. Verizon had other ideas. It hooked me up with its handy-dandy, automated "customer service" system. After considerable time, endless frustration, dozens of menu choices, innumerable digital entries, and a weird, surreal conversation with a robotized voice that stubbornly refused to understand my problem, I eventually wound up with a human representative several states away, who had no idea how I had reached her and couldn't help.

Back to the drawing board. I dialed "Information": no humans; I tried "Operator": same result. Finally, in exasperation, I rang the local billing department - they do have humans there - where a sympathetic staffer arranged to bypass the system and shunted me to a harried repair representative (probably the only one on duty), who delivered the bad news: A repairman's visit to my residence to check for malfunctions would cost $91 for each half hour. That's $182 an hour, folks; some lawyers don't charge that much. Since the problem was relatively minor, I decided to live with it awhile longer.

IT'S GOOD TO BE KING

Verizon Communications, mind you, is the leading telecommunications firm in the nation, a company that made $4.1 billion in profits in 2002 and consistently ranks in the very top tier of the Fortune 500. It has shared in the 20 percent average increase in local phone rates produced by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and can easily afford to provide good service at reasonable prices. But why should it bother? It's been deregulated and invited, in effect, to exploit customers. But it's not just the customers who get hit. Verizon made recent news by forcing early retirement on thousands of its middle managers - the better to cut costs and enhance the bottom line. Presumably, they, too, will be replaced by technology, like the thousands of laid-off operators and service representatives who preceded them out the door in the past two years. Welcome to Corporate World.

Verizon, a beneficiary of the unlimited industry mergers permitted under the Telecom Act - it absorbed rival GTE in 2000 - is only one of the media corporations changing life in my part of the state.

Our cable TV charges are steadily climbing, thanks to scandal-ridden Adelphia Communications, which gobbled up prior vendor Frontiervision in 1998 and in five years has added more than 50 percent to the monthly cost consumers pay for basic, no-frills service. Adelphia, which adds and drops channels at a whim, has no area competition, placing my locality (according to the Consumer Federation of America) among the 98 percent of U.S. communities served by only one cable company.

Lack of choice and an absence of economic competition form the basis for Corporate World and define its operating framework. Are competitive banks disappearing in your locale? They are in mine. Fleet Financial, which established a regional quasi-monopoly in New England during the 1990s, has itself lately been taken over by a national monopolist, the Bank of America. The bulk of Maine's banking business will now be controlled by the largest financial-services company in the country, one based hundreds of miles away in Charlotte, N.C.

Retailing? Like most states, Maine is increasingly ensconced under the Wal-Mart umbrella, with new outlets, including the ugly, sprawling superstores, proliferating statewide. Two are within a short driving distance of my front door, and more are on the way; one every few miles appears to be the objective. Local competitors, meanwhile, are quietly going out of business. By 2007, reports The Washington Post, Wal-Mart, already the nation's No. 1 general retailer with 3,700 stores, will control more than a third of all U.S. supermarket food sales.

ONE OF EVERYTHING

The same is increasingly true for every other area of American retail business. Oil and gasoline? Five companies now have 50 percent of the market. Restaurants? Corporate-owned chains only. Movie theaters? Ditto. Bookstores? Likewise. Stationery and hardware stores? More of the same. And with corporate ownership and control of the marketplace comes corporate arrogance: Buy their selected products, pay their prices, accept their standards, and endure their ideas of service and social responsibility - or take a hike.

In practice, this means the work force is expendable and disposable, the customer is always wrong, and the general public is, at best, an inconvenience and, at worst, a threat. Case in point: Best Buy Co. Inc., a national retail chain active in Maine, has announced unspecified plans to legally discriminate against shoppers on whom it loses money because they commit heresies like shopping only during sales or requesting too much information from salespeople.

Where we are inexorably headed is toward Corporate World's logical end: one of everything. In the case of radio broadcasting, which may best exemplify it, that translates into one station owner with one standard of programming. We're almost there. The best estimates are that four out of five U.S. radio listeners are now served by just three media corporations.

Clear Channel, the individual leader, owns more than 1,200 stations outright and is said to reach between 100 and 200 million Americans on a regular basis - another gift of the Telecom Act, which lifted ownership limits on individual broadcasters. It was Clear Channel, of course, that decreed what selection of music was suitable to be played across the country in the wake of 9/11.

Re-regulation and serious antitrust enforcement are the proven antidotes to the Corporate World virus, but don't look for them anytime soon - certainly not under the Bush administration, which never met a corporation it didn't like. Maybe it's time to break out the old Irish rebel tactic of the boycott and just say no to Corporate World. It's a plan.

Wayne M. O'Leary is an Orono writer specializing in politics and economics.

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