The Work of Bad Customers
Victim blaming is bad form, but customer blaming is A-OK
Once upon a time, when a company laid an egg, they'd own up to it. New Coke hits the shelves and America spits it out? Coca-Cola hangs their head, brings back the old formula. Crystal Pepsi goes down like window cleaner? Pepsi shrugs, pulls it off the market.
Not anymore. These days, when some boardroom genius's banal brainchild bombs, it's your fault. You, the customer, the unwashed masses too dumb to recognize brilliance when it's force-fed to you.
Take these video game outfits. They pump millions into some soulless "live service" nobody asked for, then act shocked when players don't line up to have their pockets picked. Next thing you know, the developers are on X, calling gamers entitled brats. As if we owe them our paychecks for the privilege of grinding through their half-baked, half-built ideas — many of which never leave beta.
Or how about Hollywood? Used to be, a movie flopped, the studio took its lumps and moved on. Now? If that lousy all-female reboot tanks, it's because America hates women. That diverse superhero team didn't sell tickets? Must be all those bigoted fans, not the wooden acting and paint-by-numbers plot that could’ve been handled better by a 1-2 punch of ChatGPT and an underpaid squad of Korean animators.1
These marketing types, they've got it down to a science. Show underperforms? Claim that review bombers sabotaged it. Nobody's buying your overpriced sneakers? Say it's because this generation of urban kids doesn't understand true urban style. Your fancy new AI chatbot spits out gibberish and your company’s valuation tanks? Clearly, users just aren't asking the right questions.
It's all deflection, the lot of it. Anything to avoid admitting they miscalculated, that they're out of touch with what people actually want, that the product just sucked.
But why do that when you can avail yourself of cynical and extremely selective uses of the "social justice" angle? As if buying their mediocre product is some moral imperative. You don't want to shell out three figures for the latest bug-ridden mess? Well, clearly you hate progress and probably kick puppies in your spare time.
Then there's the piracy boogeyman. Sales of your $69.99 pay-per-view superfight are down?2 Must be those dastardly pirates, not your insane prices or lack of compelling matchups. Never mind that study after study shows pirates often end up being the biggest paying customers. Facts don't matter when you're on some slacktivist crusade to break your buyers.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the customer was always right. Today? The customer's always wrong, always to blame. Didn't buy our product? You're killing jobs, destroying the economy. How dare you be so selfish as to spend your own money how you see fit!
Me, I miss the good old days, even if they were never as good as any of us remember. When a company could admit they screwed up, take it on the chin, and try again. When "creative destruction" sometimes meant bad ideas died like they were supposed to and good ones rose from the ashes. Not this endless cycle of mediocrity propped up by guilt trips, subsidies, and finger-pointing.
But what do I know? I'm just some fossil who remembers when companies vied to earn your business (or at least trick your gullible ass) instead of shaming you into it. When they tried to make products people needed instead of lecturing us on why we should want their crap.
Maybe I'm the one who's out of touch. Maybe this is progress. But from where I'm sitting, it looks an awful lot like a grown-up version of "I'm rubber, you're glue." And even though I was a homeschool kid, I know that game wasn't much fun on the playground. It's even less fun when billion-dollar corporations are playing it.
Brands cynically relying on these arguments aren’t doing any favors for the people actually doing the work of advancing such causes.
But see: “The fight cost $69.99 in the US and around $32 in the UK. To combat the potential problem of illegal streaming, the Saudis aim to fix the PPV price to less than $20 globally, while the UK price would be less than £20 ($26). It will start with Anthony Joshua vs. Daniel Dubois, priced at £19.95 ($26).”