The E word

I think the E word was the word of the year at some point recently and yes it's cheesy in the same way the word "adulting" is cheesy but dang if enshittfication isn't the theme of the late stage capitalism we're living in right now. I'm sitting here very unsuccessfully trying to check in for my Delta flight and ruminating on the fact that mobile apps replaced thousands of airline customer service agents saving airlines billions of dollars and yet their corporate masters just can't resist the urge to outsource and penny pinch the IT millions that make those billions possible.

The Points Guy was doing a bunch of retrospectives for his anniversary and this one really drove home for me how much decay is just baked into our societal expectations now. Amex (and Delta) built some gorgeous new lounges built on the idea of quiet, calm, luxurious travel and yet we're paying a $700 (and rising!) annual fee to have an hour wait to get in, no seats when finally get in, and being surrounded by feral children and business people screeching on their speakerphones. When I asked at the DFW Centurion Lounge about a shower, the attendant literally laughed at me and said if I didn't have one booked by now (ca. 7:30pm) there was no way I'd be getting one before they closed. 

Now, right on schedule, we're seeing annual fee increases and valuable programs being gutted – Amex Business losing it's 35% rebate, United PlusPoints are getting a big shakeup, and Mileage Upgrades are becoming dynamic. If I felt like it, I could probably list a dozen other things that are rotting but I'll stop there because let's be honest, it's all rotting, all the time. 

I saw the writing on the wall a while back and decided to just move all of our spending to the BofA Premium Rewards Elite. We generally gave up on airline loyalty in 2015, and now we're largely giving up on chasing the unicorn-like 13 cents per point redemptions and just using the BofA points to "buy" the cheapest/most convenient flight we find. We'll do this for a while until it becomes enshittified and another course of action makes more sense. Check back in 3 years or so ;)

(We still have over a million Amex points, so we'll definitely keep one card active, but we haven't decided which one yet.)

Yes on some level I'm just ranting, but I'll leave you with this final thought:

I worked in a call center for years, as a phone rep and then as a manager. Even in the 90s an outsourced, first-line call to tech support cost the parent company over $10 each. I can only imagine what that number is now. Recently, I was having trouble getting British Airways to refund a big lump of miles their enshittified IT systems had lost and you know what I did? I just called. And called. And called. Every. Single. Day. (Always extremely friendly, focussed, and kind! You get NOWHERE being bitchy.) 

My case had been in "research" for nearly 6 months. No, they wouldn't give me a courtesy credit until the research was done. Eventually on like my 18th call they escalated me to a manager who just poked the buttons, gave me the points, and closed my research case – very likely because I was costing the company $30+/day. It's sorta like the final scene in THX1138: the central computer just decided that giving me back my points was the cheapest thing to the company could do at that moment. I say turn the enshittification against the system whenever possible.