[jerf]

Look at the profit margin for some given company. And you need to look at the profit, not the revenue they get from you.

Many of the companies you are asking to provide service are making a buck or two a month from you, even if you are nominally paying hundreds of dollars. So if you call up a real human, you can be draining away months, years, even the entire profit margin you will ever be worth, pretty quickly. Especially if you want to be talking to someone making more than the US minimum wage.

You don't need the principle that "the only purpose of a company is to earn capital". All you need to explain the current situation is "a company can not survive if expenses exceed income". You can't have customers costing you more than they pay you and make it up in volume. So consumers are basically just boned; they will not and even can not pay enough to get good support for most of the things they buy. Not in theory, not in fact.

I know places that provide very good support. But they are places where the profit margin on a customer is well sufficient to pay for a support person's amortized time, and losing the customer still hurts the bottom line, even after a support call or three, because even three extended support calls that resulted in consults straight to engineering still weren't anywhere near enough to cancel the profit margin.

[jdbernard]

I think ISPs are actually a great counter-example to your point. The major ISPs are not dominant because they are the only ones able to stay profitable given the tight margins.

There are several examples of local, for profit, ISPs that are about to provide a better service, at a lower cost, and with better customer service. The major ISPs have not responded to this by truly outcompeting these challengers, but by weaponizing the legal system to shut these competitors down.

So, while I agree that "a company can not survive if expenses exceed income", I disagree with your premise that you cannot provide decent customer service within the profit margins of these businesses.

[sabbaticaldev]

> Look at the profit margin for some given company. And you need to look at the profit, not the revenue they get from you

this makes zero sense. Fat paychecks and bonuses are part of this calculation.

[g00gler]

You’re both right! Nuance is important :).

This is an interesting thought, assuming a call center employee is paid $35k, total cost of employment being $70k, you could hire 14.25 employees for every million dollars.

If every Concast exec got paid a paltry $5M (lowest paid exec salary), they’d be able to hire around 975 more CS reps.

They have 13.6 million subscribers, so they’d increase the number of support reps by 0.000071691176471 per customer.

My thought was maybe they could reduce their marketing budget but it seems their business has shrunken by ~50% in the past 10 years.

https://www1.salary.com/COMCAST-CORP-Executive-Salaries.html

https://www.statista.com/statistics/497279/comcast-number-vi...

[jerf]

Most people who just knee-jerk that the problem is excessive executive pay have not worked the math. This math is typical of all the businesses I've ever worked the math for. It may sound good to say "take all the executive pay" and "turn it into customer support"/"pay it to all the employees"/"drop the price of the service"/etc., but if you actually work the math typically it turns out you're trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of water. Such high pay may be problems for other reasons but it is not the root problem for very many large companies, if it is for any.