WestView

It’ll Cost You $5 to Talk to a Real Person

July 2009, by George Capsis

At the monthly WestView editorial meeting in the now rain-lush garden at 69 Charles Street, we serve a California Chardonnay that’s “clean and intense,” has won a double Gold Medal, and costs just $3. Yes, of course, it’s the Trader Joe’s “Two Buck Chuck” Chardonnay, produced by a protean Napa Valley ego named Fred Franzia who owns 40,000 acres of vineyards and makes half a billion bucks a year.

In the history of wine sales Franzia is an Attila the Hun who contemptuously crushes all competition with rock-bottom prices. “No wine should cost more than $10 a bottle,” he says in a profile in the May 18th New Yorker. He also asks rhetorically, “Do you get 40 times more pleasure from an $80 bottle of wine?” The New Yorker piece makes you believe that Franzia is the kind of guy who picks his nose in public but has a steel grip on how to make money in the wine business (or any business, for that matter) - buy low and sell even lower.

My wife Maggie loves the wine (the brand name is Charles Shaw) and indeed there is no reason for me to search the shaky revolving close-out rack at Wholesale Wines for a “find” under five bucks (and anyway Wholesale Wines gives all its advertising to The Villager). This got me thinking about what things should cost today.

Yesterday, I went into the tiny shoe repair shop on Bleecker for a new pair of shoelaces. After rummaging through a cluttered drawer the owner came up with a skinny shop-worn pair and said, “$2.00.”

“When I was a kid shoelaces cost ten cents,” I blurted out in mock indignation.

“Sure,” said the shopkeeper. “But I pay $7,000 a month in rent.”

I went across the street to the newsstand to buy the Times. The price had gone up in May and now, my very anemic-looking daily Times (it has cut paper and ink costs along with its newsroom staff) is $2. The Sunday Times is $5. When I was a lot younger the daily Times was three cents and the News two cents. (I can see my kids now as I write this, rolling their eyes in a “not again, Dad.”) Things are so bad at the Times it sold its nice new Renzo Piano, leased back its office space, and sold a third of the company to a Mexican media billionaire called, appropriately enough, “Slim.”

There are lots of sneaky price rises such as the ever-increasing interest on credit cards, a 58% increase in our water tax in just 4 years, and the unconscionable hike in parking fees at Pier 40. Amy’s Bread has raised the price of its small sourdough boule from $1 to $1.50. We have come to accept impenetrable bills from our cable and telephone companies, indecipherable clusters of taxes and fees, and cellphone bills that arrive with an even more exotic filigree of charges.

Like the Bleecker Street cobbler and shoestring peddler, the Times has a monthly “rent” - the service on $1,300,000,000 in debt and the well-documented loss of advertising. It has to find money some place. And it has to raise the price of the paper. Which reminds of the story of the fruit peddler in the market of Santo Tomás Chichicastenango, Guatemala, who when asked why she sold her visibly inferior fruit at higher prices than the lush offerings of her neighbors, replied, “Since I sell less, I need to ask more.”

So the Times gives you less news for more money and companies automate and outsource customer calls to India to desperately avoid having to pay an American worker an American salary.

I called my new tv company, Direct TV, for the first time and was told by a computer voice that she (or it?) was delighted to answer all my questions by automation, but should I want to speak to a real person, it would cost $5. I invested the $5 to tell the “real person” that any company that charges $5 to speak to a “real person” is not a company that I wish to do business with, and I cancelled my account.

“Sure, but that will cost you $480,” answered the “real person” costing me $5 on the other end of the line. “You have a contract. And we charge $20 a month for a cancellation.” It seems that the cable companies lobbied the FCC some time ago so that now, when you verbally request a new service, you have legally signed up, and you will then be forced to pay a penalty for succumbing to the commercial with the two nice servicemen in their gentle cable rivalry.

Life has become too complicated to live. It makes me want to reach for a glass of $3 wine.

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