The other issue has been that my friend that I have been staying with has been unemployed for a little bit. I feel that I can say that because no one close to him reads this and because he is very close to getting a new job I think I can talk about it. Amongst my friends, I have been unemployed more often than the rest, but since I live closer to the edge I have had a greater necessity of finding employment quickly, so I have been unemployed for less time than one or two of my friends. But that said, I know the stress of being unemployed, however, he is married and has kids, so it is a little more stressful. He has an employed wife which might make things easier and tougher at the same time.
His stresses come mostly because he is a transition male in our society, meaning he has been raised to be the primary wage earner for his family, but his wife is a close second. He feels that in order to take care of his family correctly he needs to be able to take care of the financial needs of his family exclusively and unfortunately, his wife is of the same mind. She has sacrificed two of her earning years to be on Maternity Leave to raise children and so is not nearly as advanced in her career as she could be. She feels that she should be able to quit work and take the time to raise her children full time too. And this is no longer a reality of family life in this age. But it is her dream, it is both of their dream. They are both smart people and so they have looked at the numbers and they have looked at them twice. They know what the savings are and the costs are, but right now there is a lot of resentment because they can't do these things right now, because he is unemployed.
It also helps that she hates her job. The only thing that made her job bare able in the past was that she and my friend worked at the same company. And that they removed her husband's position but kept her there is part of the resentment. The largest part of the resentment is a familiar ring to anyone who reads what I write more than casually. The economy is changing and the economic model that companies are using has yet to reflect these changes. The model is of increasing profits every year. What I mean is there is only so many dollars available for investment in the economy and most products in each sector are nearly identical, but the push is for steady continual growth year after year and these expectations are how bonuses and stock prices are valued at. But since there is a limited growth potential, because the competing products are essentially identical, unrealistic long term and short term goals of growth are set and when they are not met share prices drop and bonuses are not paid.
When in Canada for example, we have three large national Cell Phone companies: Bell, Rogers and Telus. We have a few regional and small companies too, but they are really very small in comparison. The market place is small, because it is Canada and we are right beside the United States and they have nine times the population as we do and a much denser country too. Most of the population of Canada is close to the American boarder, but it is a very long boarder so expanding into this country has a very large price tag attached in investment for a small number of potential customers, so the Big Three Cell companies are the only real players for the foreseeable future. Each company offers identical services, each company offers similar high charges and high prices and each company has identically crappy customer service, so essentially they are identical companies. Each company expects to increase their sales by 10% each year, but the only way they can do that is to take business away from their competitors and by getting customers to abandon their land lines and get cellphones. That last segment of the population is not very big at all. There are new customers as young people are more likely to have cellphones than landlines, but that will change eventually when everyone has a cellphone. And each company grew for ten years by 10% because of these new customers, but recently this has stopped to be the case. Each cellphone company has an equal share of the customers but one year they did not make their expected 10% increase in business, they only got 9%. Because they did not meet their expectations, they did not meet their expected profits so their shareholders are not going to be happy and the share prices of the stocks will drop, the company will not pay its employees a bonus. But the company still earned profit and it did grow, it just did not reach the growth potential of previous years and why would they, there is no difference between the three big companies.
But there is something that these companies can do to increase profits to the same as they had in years past, they can lay off employees. And this works, mostly because most people do not work at peak productivity all the time, most people never work at peak productivity actually, so cutting back some of the workers and transferring the work will bring efficiencies to the company and since they are paying less people the profits are the same as years past and so stock prices remain the same and the executive that proposed the layoffs gets a bigger bonus. The next year, profits are down again, because the products are still the same and there are less new customers, but expected growth targets are still high, so more layoffs occur.
After a few years of this the companies begin to look different. The people that were once working at 80% peak a few years ago have more work to do than they can possibly do and are getting behind, the customer service department has been outsourced to a developing country with a thick English accent that most Canadian speakers have difficulty understanding, but are a tenth the cost of locals and the products still have not changed, but the expectation of growth still exists. Add to the mix that the current employees have job security issues because of the layoffs that have happened in the past, so despite being over worked they are not likely to complain. But still the products have not changed. The services are even crappier, the charges for their services have climbed recently. Each company is equally crappy, but together they have a monopoly on the business.
There are two ways out of this death spiral for these companies, one which is they offer different products to steal product share from their competitors, but that is a limited prospect, because the products are transparent and easy to copy and so there is only one other option, reduce expectations of growth. If the profit of a company is a 0% increase, that means it made as much money as it did the last year and this is the eventual end state of any mature company in a stable population where the product is unchanging and each competitor is offering exactly the same thing.
My friends never worked for cell phone companies, but this example works for many types of company models, computer sales through cell phones, fast food through travel agencies, coffee places through garden centres.
I am supposed to be writing an Exalted Adventure, but I had this on my chest to get off.
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