A pensioner, or some other figure that commands your immediate sympathy, is trudging home through the snow – oh, all right, forget the snow – when out pops a hoodie and asks for her (it’s got to be ‘her’) purse. He takes out £3 – €4 or so – and hands back the rest.
Does the lady complain? Of course she does. Do the police take an interest? Naturally. Does the legal system punish such infamy? You bet. Unless, that is, you substitute ‘banker’, ‘insurance company’ or ‘internet trader’ for ‘hoodie’.
On two occasions in the last month some agent of commerce has actually complained of the missing sum I’m trying to retrieve from them that, ‘it’s only £3’. This, it appears, is becoming the Gouge Threshold, the moneybags’ definition of ‘so little money it’s not worth bothering about’. The amount’s worth stealing if you do it often enough, but not so large that most half-awake consumers will notice, and if they do the authorities won’t be interested in chasing the robbers. And all because of technology.
What is it about internet transactions that persuades service providers that they’re entitled to take money off you in ways they wouldn’t dream of attempting in a shop? Last month, for example, my bank opened a new card account I hadn’t asked for and transferred some of my money to it. Because of this complication, my credit card bill wasn’t paid in time and the bank tried to charge me interest. When I insisted they take responsibility for the delay and pay me back, they protested, ‘but it's only...’
When, a couple of weeks later, I insured a hire car online, the site set out its prices in sterling but billed its fees in Euros. The bill when it came was higher than I expected. The extra arose from fees for the currency transactions between my bank account, through the credit card company to the insurance company. But I mustn’t worry, the insurer told me, because ‘it's only...'’
The sums add up: £3, plus £3, on £3 and endlessly on. Multiply it by the number of transactions of this sort we all make and it’s a significant hidden subsidy to dishonest, and often very big, companies who know better. I can prove they know better because most of the time, once you complain, they pay up. But their dirty little secret is that so much cash can be made from gouging those who think banks and insurance companies can be trusted.
It’s everywhere you look. Budget airlines are world-class champions of the mean, hidden gouge. One couple I know whose son was sent to Dublin for three months are well used to one airline’s ways. It turns out you can book a return flight for two in one transaction – but the card-transaction fee is charged four times, once in each direction per person.
If you wonder what this has to do with manufacturing, I'll tell you. It’s that institutional investors like banks and insurance companies set the moral climate that all businesses have to survive in. Because of that, something deeply troubling is happening to all business ethics.
We’ve never been told more about how ethical companies are, or how much trouble they go to root out sexual, racial or even age-related discrimination. Their websites are dripping with pictures of their creches, the charities they support, the fun runs their employees endure for good causes, and the children in far-off lands who would be homeless, school-less and without water and body parts were it not for their largesse. They buy so much of their energy and raw materials from renewable sources that it’s all their senior directors can do not to brag about their bicycle journeys to work.
What’s too often missing from this partial and wholly misleading picture is any simple statement that the company makes every penny of its income honestly. Or would that be a USP too far?
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