When did rip-off become the norm?
By Andrew O'Hagan
Here's a modern tale of comfort and joy. One of my relatives has recently been very ill and he called me to say he would love to go to Ireland for a week. I said he should leave it to me. I found a house on the internet and booked it, and called some local restaurants to make reservations. Everything was shaping up nicely.
Then I turned to the question of getting my relative and his partner from Inverness to Cork by plane, which necessitates him coming to London first.
He has trouble walking, so there was no question of him travelling from Luton airport to Heathrow, where we would be required to pick up the plane to Cork. So the plane from Inverness had to come into Heathrow.
There was no way round this and I had to bite the bullet and pay £250 per round-trip ticket from BMI. I paid for this online and then went ahead and bought some much more reasonably priced return tickets from London to Cork. Three minutes after booking them, I realised the date was wrong on the BMI tickets.
When clicking many dozens of buttons I must have clicked a wrong one. A simple mistake, so I phoned them.
"You will have to pay an extra £30 per person to change this ticket," said the British Midland agent.
"But I only booked them a few seconds ago," I said.
"It will be £30 per person."
"But that's inhuman," I said. (Knowing this surcharge was more than the price of most cheap domestic flights.)
Silence. I told him to go ahead and charge me the extra and he made the changes. But as I put the phone down, I realised once again that there is no rage quite like that which comes from the feeling that one is living in a rip-off culture. British Midland had already received a handsome sum for two economy tickets on a domestic flight, but it obviously felt justified in taking the very first opportunity to demand more.
When did this start in Britain? When did ordinary commercial transactions become so fraught with rules, pitfalls, punishments, and exploitation?
Many of these companies behave as if customers are a sort of enemy made vulnerable by their needs, and the systems put in place to "serve" us - though now and then still manned by human beings - are as inflexible as machines. Anyone who has waited on the phone for 40 minutes to query their gas bill - only to be cut off by a digital voice - will know what I mean.
Therefore, in this context - the context of our daily lives - the GMTV scandal comes as no surprise. We already know that we live in a world of hidden charges, so these phone lines (for competitions, votes, advice) are geared to bleed us as much as possible, while callers are allowed to imagine they are participating in something fair and promising. It's a disgustingly cynical ploy on the part of those companies, but no different in kind from the sort of dismaying exploitation of weakness that goes on every second of every day.
There's no bank in your village or part of town, so you'll pay £1.75 a time to withdraw your own money from a cashline machine at the local newspaper shop. You're running for a train and are told you can buy the ticket on board, but find they charge you £2 extra for the privilege.
You buy a new computer and are pleased to find it boasts of its 24-hour helpline; then, when you can't work out how to get it going, you find yourself in a queue for the "helpline" at 49p per minute.
You go to a restaurant and discover at the end they've stuck 12.5 per cent service charge on the bill, whether you felt happy with the service or not. You call a man to come and look at your dishwasher. "OK, then. I can come out a week on Wednesday, but my call-out fee is £90." Call-out fee? Who invented that?
Last week, a Virgin Atlantic representative walked up to me as I was standing in a queue at Heathrow and asked me if I'd like an upgrade.
"Oh, how nice," I said.
"Just to the exit row," she said. "And that will cost £50."
"For the exit row! When did you start charging people for that?"
"Oh, everybody does," she said. "We're told to ask people. You don't get nothing for nothing nowadays."
Indeed. It costs something for everything. Again, I wondered how we came to live in a culture that is so money-grubbing, so weaselling about the rules, and so respectful of the seller's liberties over the customer's rights.
In 1950, there appeared an article in Picture Post headlined "The Shop round the Corner: Does it Deserve to Survive?". Among many arguments for and against, the writer argued that there was an informality about the small shop that made all the difference when it came to everyday life.
"Tired housewives can drop in," she wrote, "dressed in kitchen aprons, men in dungarees call in on their way home from work. One customer I know regularly fetches his newspaper wearing his dressing-gown; another sends his dog. And always there is a welcome for the children, an intelligent interpretation of scribbled shopping lists, and a touching interest in child welfare."
"Welcome", "intelligent", "touching", "welfare" - now there's a quartet of words you are unlikely to find in the British Midland Handbook of Charm. The above quote comes from a marvellous new book called Austerity Britain, 1945-51 by David Kynaston, published in a fortnight.
Reading it, I found myself increasingly unable to answer a simple question about life in this country: why are we less human and less kind when prosperous than we managed to be when we were poor? No washing machines, no Starbucks, no computers, no television - but people evidently knew how to listen in a spirit of fairness.
Answers on a postcard please. And I promise to keep all charges for reading them to an absolute minimum.
|
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
The "rip-off culture" in modern Britain
Similar Threads
Linear Mode
