April 12, 2007

• Another Golden Age Gone

  In general, getting older has more advantages than disadvantages:  more experience, skill, confidence, etc.  As life goes on, we see many interesting new discoveries and useful innovations, too, but there is a bittersweet feeling for me as I watch the passing of some things I might have preferred to see stay around.

  I was born during the Golden Age of Radio.  Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, Inner Sanctum, The Shadow, and Amos and Andy were great popular entertainment for their time.  A lot of that material is gone now, lost if it was ever recorded at all.  Some of what survives has not held up well to the passage of time.  Jokes that were timely then just fall flat now, and the ones that were too racist or sexist for our time are embarrassing or outrageous.  Even so, I sometimes miss the old radio shows and am happy that radio endures and is being updated and upgraded by NPR.

  I lived through the Golden Age of TV.  I tuned into Howdy Doody, American Bandstand, and Gunsmoke.  Along with the rest of America, I was bamboozled by cigarette commercials that made health claims for their products, and by rigged quiz shows like the $64,000 Question.  In the 1960s, I turned on to psychedelics, tuned in to higher consciousness, dropped out of the military-industrial complex, and turned off the TV.

  Briefly, around 1980 and again around the turn of the millennium, I tuned back in long enough to enjoy Hill Street Blues and The West Wing, but the commercial hype and political propaganda that were rampant in the medium turned me off, and I tuned out again.  Even though I think America has over the years benefited from some loss of innocence and gullibility, my fellow Americans still appear eager to swallow way too much hype and disinformation.

  I don’t think many if any of us watching I Love Lucy or listening to One Man’s Family thought of ourselves as taking part in a Golden Age.  For a while, it seemed that shows would just keep getting better, and we didn’t realize that any program or the entire medium had jumped the shark or gone over the hill until the apex was past.  There is disagreement now regarding the Golden Age of Film, because some feel it has already passed and others believe that movies are better than ever.  History will have to make that judgment sometime.

  I have been told by a few Xanga relics that I got here too late for Xanga’s golden age, but you can’t miss what you never had, and even with all the changes I have seen here in almost five years, Xanga is still golden for me.  I took part in the back-to-the-land movement a generation ago, watched it wane and then saw some of the best aspects of it resurge as “voluntary simplicity,” so that’s another golden age on which the jury is still out.  I’ve seen some other social trends come and go, and I suppose some of them may come back around again.  There is one of them whose passing I have been observing recently that I would really like to see revitalized:  consumer protection and consumer affairs.

  For a while, local, state and federal governments were creating consumer protection agencies, hiring ombudsmen, and seeking to make it harder for businesses and industry to cheat customers or sell dangerous or defective products.  Then I began to hear complaints about the costs of litigation of consumer claims.  As lawyers and bean couters scrambled to cover their employers’ asses, foodstuffs, cosmetics, tools and electronic devices began wearing warning labels that ranged from obvious to absurd.

   The Alaska State Attorney General’s office used to have a Consumer Protection Section.  They closed it, and now the state recommends that consumers with complaints hire lawyers, go to small claims court, or contact the Better Business Bureau.

  For a couple of decades, I could count on being able to contact the manufacturer or distributor if the count was short in a bottle of vitamins or the peas were mixed in with the brownie in a frozen meal.  Some of those consumer reps were so falsely solicitous and fulsomely apologetic that I almost gagged, but I held my nose and kept making the effort to get my money’s worth.

  It brought an occasional bonanza such as the time I wrote to Stagg to complain that their new turkey chili didn’t taste like chili, but like some kind of sweet turkey tomato soup.  Not long after that, the UPS contractor out here delivered a big long box containing a row of cans – one each of every kind of chili they made, with a note suggesting that I might find some flavor more to my liking.  The Jalapeno Hot was best, and Steakhouse was okay if I added hot sauce.

  For a while about fifteen years ago, the Banquet frozen foods company kept us supplied with what threatened to be an endless supply of nasty, barely-edible fried chicken.  Each time we complained about a package, they’d send us coupons for two free packages.  There were a couple of very lean winters for us during that time, and we ate a lot of stringy, greasy, overly salty fried chicken when we had little else to eat. 

  Once our economic situation improved, though, we stopped redeeming those coupons.  A company standing behind its products is a fine concept, but I do question the policy of backing up inferior stuff with just more of the same.  Sometimes, it would seem appropriate to simply give a refund and stop pretending that the inferior product was some sort of temporary fluke or transient problem at the factory.

  Lately, I have noticed that some packages no longer have consumer comment phone numbers.  Several times, when I have reported shortages or defects, I have received non-committal responses from the people I spoke to and there were no offers of replacement.  I have begun paying closer attention to printed guarantees and the presence or absence of consumer contact information.  The Coca Cola company solicits comments through a web form, but the response falls somewhere between defensive and indifferent.  They obviously aren’t worried about losing an occasional customer.

  Even when there is an 800 number to call, and a satisfaction guarantee, it’s not always easy to get a satisfactory result.  We got an excellent sale price on four Fred Meyer frozen pizzas, for the convenience of Doug who likes to eat but doesn’t like to take time away from his gaming or writing to cook good food.  They were all from the same lot, and the sauce on them was so watery that it ran off the pan when the pizzas were cut.  I called the number, was told to return the empty box to the local store, and the product would be replaced free of charge.

  Greyfox returned the box from the first pizza before we had eaten the second one and discovered that it was the same way.  Each of the first four pizzas and some of the replacements had the same watery and tasteless sauce.  One-by-one, the boxes were returned to the store by either Greyfox or me.  Sometimes the replacements were given without any fuss or hassle, sometimes it was necessary to have a checker call a supervisor over to approve it, and one time even the shift supervisor refused to make the exchange.

  That time, it was Greyfox who went through the hassle and delay of trying to deal with Doug’s pizza problem, and I heard about it in agonizing detail during our nightly phone call.  I called the 800 number and explained the situation to the consumer rep who answered.  She made me repeat all the details, I suppose so that her supervisor could hear the story.  She apologized, assured me that the store should have made the exchange, took my contact information and suggested that we try again and call them if we were again refused.

  Greyfox had kept the pizza box that nobody would accept, so he took it back in and that time the exchange was made.  A few weeks later, when I had nearly forgotten the incident, I was online when CallWave took a message from the local store’s manager.  I could hear the embarrassed anxiety in his voice as he said that it seemed some of his “good employees had dropped the ball.”  

  He asked me to call him back to discuss the matter, but since the latest replacement attempt had succeeded and the latest pizza didn’t run all over the countertop, I didn’t bother.  I have been thinking about calling again, though, because it seems they solved the problem not by thickening and improving the sauce, but by using less of the original thin, insipid recipe.  Oh, well…. 

  

  • 1:51 pm
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