The Customer Is Always Ripe

       I have never seen an airline employee use a cattle prod on passengers.   However,  the image does occur to me, and not only  when I travel.  To my mind it symbolizes the fading  of a venerable term --  customer service --  toward that nether region  where outmoded concepts go to be quaint. There it will join smaller casualties of changing times, such as personal letter.  And it will join much greater ones, such as two from the world of politics, dignity and tolerance.
    Of course airlines are not alone in treating customers as a necessary evil. The style has been favored for years by insurance companies, which are keen to sell their product but loath to see it actually used.
     Yet who would have foreseen  a day when many businesses deal with customers by resourcefully hiding from them?  We've all had the experience. The automated phone tree offers me every option for service except the one I really need. The automated, on-line help page,with its list of Frequently Asked Questions, suggests that I am the only person on the planet who wants to know what I want to know. My question is not frequently asked. It is not even occasionally asked. I am an outlier on the bell curve of customer behavior. I am a nuisance.
   In the uncommon event that these robots clearly offer the option of access to a human being, the human being is  too busy to talk right away, even though my call is Very Important To Us. The human being is helping other customers  -- most of whom, like me, are twiddling their thumbs on hold. Our time, in the aggregate, is less important than the time of the human being whose wages we are paying and who supposedly is employed for our convenience.
    As the country learned the hard way, the ethic of customers-as-chattel has penetrated the banking industry as well.  And it has seeped all the way down, to affect the smallest of the small fry, people like me.
    My requirements of my bank are  simple. I want my money safely kept. I want portions of it promptly returned to me when I ask.  But nowadays, to gain access to my own money, I must run a gauntlet of sales pitches:

    Teller: "Have you considered our new warp-speed account bundle with color-coded deposit and withdrawal slips?"
    Me: "Yes. I've heard about it. But I don't  want it, thank you."
    Teller: "But you're missing so much."
    Me: "I'm aware of what I'm missing. I don't need it."
    Teller: "But you could have funds automatically moved among your accounts at night, and receive a complete update on your cellphone the next morning."
    Me: "I don't need to bank while I sleep, and I don't want to do arithmetic before breakfast."
    Teller, eyebrows arching: "Really!"

    I am old enough to remember when banks offered toasters as sales inducements. Now they offer scolding and guilt.
    In his satirical comic strip Li'l Abner, the late Al Capp presented the character of the shmoo. A shmoo was a chubby little bowling pin of a creature with a cheerful grin and a bottomless desire to enhance the happiness of human beings.
    Shmoos were plentiful. They reproduced exponentially and asexually. They needed only air. They  abundantly  gave eggs, milk and butter (no churning needed).  And shmoos gave themselves. If  a shmoo sensed that a nearby human being was hungry, it would cheerfully cook itself for dinner. Fried shmoo tasted like chicken.  Broiled shmoo tasted like steak.  Shmoos would undergo any circumstance to please.
    At the epicenter of commerce by shakedown -- industries with monopolistic advantage -- there is a certain inescapable shmoo-ness in the customer role. Other industries may be thinking wishfully when they adopt the model. I know of businesses that will not hand me over to an automaton when I need service. I favor them vigorously when I shop, and I am not alone in this.
    We probably should not imagine a focused consumer revolt. But traditional business may not be immune to the kind of creeping customer desertion that mortally wounded the American auto industry and American newspapers.
    Meanwhile, at certain points of my consumer need, I suppose I must grin shmoo-like and learn to live with realities.
    A bank is, whatever else, a better repository than a mattress.
    Usually.