Karen’s laptop computer died last Thursday, June 26.
We needed a replacement pronto. We bought it online from our usual source, a big maker that’s a ModernIR customer so we’ll maintain confidentiality.
We paid for expedited delivery, which said it would arrive Saturday the 28th.
The order transferred to UPS (not a customer so we’ll use the name). The first notice said it would now come Friday the 27th instead and offered a tracking number. Good news!
Then it got weird.
Tracking data said it had shipped from Louisville, KY, to Craig, CO. Craig is west of both Steamboat Springs and the airport in Hayden. Why send something west that needs to go east?
Friday came and went. Then the tracking data said it would arrive Saturday but gave no indication it was out for delivery. It appeared to be sitting in Craig. We called Craig UPS. The phone rang and rang. Repeated tries never raised anyone.
We started calling customer service at both the shipper and the sender. You literally cannot get a human on the phone on a Saturday – or a Sunday, turns out – at the computer manufacturer.
After several tries, we got through to UPS. Well, sort of. UPS India. Probably UPS outsources customer service to Infosys or Wipro or Accenture (a client). They assured us it would arrive Saturday before 7pm because the “terms of service require it.”
I’ll spare you the rest save to say that after hours and hours and finally railing at people, the laptop arrived late Monday afternoon the 30th.
Here’s what I think. Nobody was working at UPS in Craig over the weekend. They just…didn’t show up.
The state of American customer service is appalling and not limited to UPS.
We had dinner and a tour at Hayden Fresh Farm outside Steamboat on Sunday. The owners previously ran the feed store in The Boat. They sold it because they couldn’t get reliable staff. Told to do something, the youngsters they employed would accuse the owners of “bullying.”
A new friend was out at one of our hundred-plus Steamboat restaurants the other night. We’ve got some great ones, including Yampa River Icehouse, a barbecue joint where this conversation occurred. This friend is a big developer around the US and Mexico.
“I don’t typically say anything,” he said. “But the service was so bad I couldn’t help it.”
We encounter this condition all the time. No one seems to care. You can’t run a country with people who don’t serve customers and don’t want to work.
So, here’s my open letter to The Government.
We’ve got 273 million American adults of working age who are not in school or the military. Of those, about 163 million are employed, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly 103 million are not.
What are they doing? Not working at UPS, apparently. Or the feed store.
If we all were awash in cash and leisure time, I wouldn’t care. But no, scores of millions equating to over half the population receives some form of entitlement, a fancy word for “I don’t work.”
So then the government imported labor by opening the border, despite a Constitutional proviso requiring a uniform standard of naturalization that all the people of both parties who use the Constitution as a political cudgel ignore.
And the Biden administration spent four years running 7% budget deficits that exploded the contribution of government to GDP by literally hundreds of percentage points versus the long-run average back to WWII.
That’s not an economy. That’s a Ponzi scheme.
Now the Trump administration is trying to change it. I’m for tariffs that protect our standard of living so that those with an absolute cost advantage don’t loot this country as has happened for 50 years. I’m for shrinking the size of government, promoting investment that fosters jobs, reducing red tape, putting Americans first.
I’m a libertarian, not a free-trader.
But this is not going to be a smooth transition.
Ronald Reagan did similar things. We had a severe recession and high unemployment before Morning in America arrived. He was loathed before he was loved.
The Trump administration is not preparing us for what happens when addiction breaks.
And things are not awesome. The $16 trillion Jamie Dimon said flooded the planet not from productive output but printing presses fostered this obscene condition where financial markets are stuffed with cryptocurrencies and ETFs and every asset class is so valuable nobody can sell anything – especially a house.
Gresham’s Law. Bad money drives the good money out into assets people hoard. And all the prices rise. And people want to sell. And nobody can afford to buy. So then what?
And jobs data for June arrive tomorrow. Remember, nobody wants to work.
I heard real estate investor Mark Cardone clamoring for a rate cut because “Jay Powell is destroying the housing industry.” No, the government did that, by inflating assets. Is the right response more cheap money?
And the capital markets run on machines and ETFs and cryptocurrencies. Up and up and up things go, as bubbles always do, unaware.
I would urge the Trump administration to reset expectations. It’s going to be a rough transition. When you come off heroin, it’s bad news. But you need to come off heroin.
You’ll need us, public companies and investors. We can read all the data. And help you get through it.
