One kind gesture is a reminder to all the vultures

MOMENTS before my mother drove away from a Dundee dealership in the gleaming new car she had spent months choosing, t he salesman appeared with a bouquet of flowers.

‘these are for you,’ he said. ‘ And don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’re unsure about anything at all. Delighted to help.’

Had I witnessed this in my cynical youth, I might have done that gagging mime with my finger. What a schmoozer. Mother, don’t you dare fall for this blarney. But bitter experience of the manner in which business is conducted nowadays teaches us to cherish rare acts of benevolence wherever we find them, however obvious their motivation.

My mother adores flowers. I don’t care if they came from the garage forecourt down the road. It’s fine if it was palpably a ploy to keep custom. It doesn’t even matter if every dealership in town doles out blooms on drive-away day. It was a nice touch and a satisfied customer headed home feeling good about her transaction. More commonly in the world of commerce we head home feeling like we need a shower.

Among the most saddening things for me in this week’s Mail investigation into private parking firms was the realisation among hitherto trusting souls that the game had changed. Once they were customers; now they are prey.

Intimidation

this was no longer about car parks making a profit from motorists paying for a service. It was about profiteering from paying customers’ honest mistakes or oversights. the modern game is an intimidation campaign where ever more threatening demands for payment of so-called ‘fines’ drop onto doormats – and where f ears of f i nancial disaster for non-payers are insidiously fed into customers’ minds.

those who ignore penalties will be referred to credit agencies, warned one website, no doubt evoking nightmare scenarios of refused mortgage applications and car loans. It turns out non-payment of such penalties has no effect on credit ratings whatsoever.

When did it become OK to treat customers with such contempt? Is it taught in business schools? Many would cite Ryanair as a trailblazer in the field. there was an evil genius, they said, about fining customers for failing to print out their own boarding passes and putting a set of scales at the boarding gate to screw more money out of passengers whose hand luggage was an ounce or two overweight.

Any airline prepared to make life this unpleasant for the flying public simply must be the cheapest, the thinking went.

It i s fascinating, l ooking back, to see how closely their rivals must have been watching. the nice touches which once came as standard – the meal, the complimentary drink, the sweetie to suck on descent – are memories from an age of air travel we now refer to as the 20th century.

In the 21st, we pay for the privilege of taking luggage with us, for choosing a seat and even for getting on the plane early enough to find a place to put our bags.

We have a phenomenon called overbooking where airlines deliberately sell more seats than they have, in the assumption some passengers will not show. When too many do, they tell people the flight is full and they cannot board – as easyJet did with Jo Wood. Admittedly, this is a step up in service from dragging them off the plane and knocking their teeth out, as United Airlines did with David Dao.

the game has changed. Where once airlines sold all their seats and put any overflow passengers on standby, now they sell all their seats and then some – and make it the customer’s problem when this profit-boosting strategy results in chaos at the gates.

Lucrative

there are new rules of engagement in the car hire business as well. Firms find it more lucrative to sell you basic insurance and then tell you all the different parts of the vehicle – tyres, windscreen, wing mirrors – which are not covered by it.

Want to chance it with our bargain basement package, sir? Fine, we’ll just block a couple of grand on your credit card and keep it if you have an accident. Have a nice day – and don’t forget to fill in our customer satisfaction survey.

Welcome changes in the law now mean banks and insurance companies must lodge customer complaints with the Financial Conduct Authority. there were 17,000 a day in the second half of last year.

How many, I wonder, were from trusting souls unaware of the new rules operated by car insurers? In this sector, customer loyalty is no longer rewarded but ruthlessly punished. that is why insurers keep increasing premiums for motorists who have been with them for years and, clearly, cannot be bothered to take their business elsewhere.

Clobber them for their indolence. See how far into penury we can push them before they get off their fat backsides and shop around. that is the way the game is played today.

the f l owers my mother received said all those glib things we hear from businesses every day: thank you, we value your custom, it really matters what you think of us. But they were said in the language of the old rulebook, where the words still meant something.

Perhaps we should hope that game becomes current again. Or perhaps demand it does.