The Power of the Consumer
November 14, 2006 at 01:43 by Mike McQuaid
(Topic brutally stolen from Neil’s blog!)
For the last few years, every time it comes to renew my mobile phone, phone or internet contracts I threaten to cancel and immediately get around 25% of the price knocked off.
My Dell laptop I bought in the summer was ~£1050, and I haggled it down to ~£900.
You do have a lot of power in these areas, and its a good thing people are starting to realise it. Another area in which we have power, that people don’t seem to realise is in NOT buying things.
I must have heard a hundred people complain about Windows this year, and I say the same thing to almost all of them. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. The only reason Windows is so poor is because people keep buying it even when they think its rubbish, because they can’t be bothered to investigate the other options. I don’t agree with Nestle, Microsoft or McDonald’s business practises, so I don’t buy from them, simple as that!
It amazes me that more people seem to treat large business like their masters. They complain about products, but buy them anyway. People buy food they don’t like, computers that “don’t work” (sic) and appliances they can’t use. I’ll never understand why people do this. Part of me just thinks that most people just do what everyone else does simply because its easier than investigating the alternatives.
Has our apathetic nature as consumers bled into politics too? We see pathetically low voting turnouts in major western countries, hailed as the great “democracies” (really elected bureaucracies) of this world.
Are we too busy working to care about our government, our products and the rest of the world? Have we always been like this? How can we change things?
