It is mind-boggling how incompetent U.S. companies have become.
Donald Trump’s arrival and his association with Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy are just in time. Within the space of 24 hours, we had interactions with three major U.S. companies that left us high and dry. I will not name the specific companies, as I assume that their competitors are equally incompetent. The state of American business is horrific.
We’ll start with the bank. Our U.S. bank is one of the largest in the world. We have debit cards from said bank, and when we are in the U.S. on holiday, we rely on those cards for all of our purchases. So what happens when the cards begin to get declined? One might get by with cash on hand or whip out an Israeli credit card and swallow the extra charges for the conversion of dollars to shekels. But why were our cards getting declined? The bank never reached out to us to say that there was a problem; rather, they simply shut off our cards and access to our checking accounts. I guess that their theory is that when a client gets desperate enough, he or she will call the number on the back of the card in order to fix the problem. So what was the problem?
It would appear that it started when I tried to redeem some points that had accrued for a gift card. The primary cell number in our account is Israeli, and while the automatic system sends SMS messages to Israel, when you speak to back-office employees, they cannot. So they could not send me an SMS in order to verify my identity. Not to worry! They gave me a four-question multiple-choice test, supposedly based on public records. The problem is that there are a lot of Alan Bauers in the world, and in the past they asked our son which car he owned when he had just had his bar mitzvah. And they did it again, asking me which of four companies where I had worked when I knew none of them. So I failed the exam and they locked my card—without telling me. Not being able to use the card to buy gas or a Coke was the sign that I needed to get back in touch with my bank, with whom I speak more often than with my closest relatives.
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In calling the bank, their voice-identification system apparently identified me as our son. So they locked his card as well. When I took him to a local branch with his debit card, Nevada driver’s license and U.S. passport, the local branch official called the back office to say that so-and-so has been identified and was sitting in the branch. That was not enough. It took a full hour after that to get the back office person to relent and release his card, after I produced a Consular Report of Birth Abroad showing that I am his father. We apparently spend our vacations in various branches of our bank.
Next we move on to a major amusement park. While some of the family was on their way there, I decided to buy them tickets in order to a) surprise them and b) get them into the park faster. Well, did I fail. When they arrived, they produced the tickets I forwarded to them. But since I, the purchaser, was not named on the tickets, they refused to accept them. My wife went toe-to-toe with their guy for a while. Eventually, he canceled my order (I’m still waiting to see the money) and made her buy three new tickets with the same names on them. Have they never heard of forwarding an email with an attachment? Apparently not.
And now we move over to a car rental. It’s not one of the big ones, but rather a niche outfit with a more eclectic offering of cars. I just got out of a Cyber Truck and would be delighted to drive it forever. One of our boys made a 24-hour rental, and he went to add his brothers. Because one of them recently updated his debit card details on the company website, he was removed by the company’s system from both renting cars and joining others on rentals. Hours on the phone did nothing to help the situation. Their representatives admitted that all was in order but their tech guys could not figure out how to fix the problem. Finally, after two days, he was reinstated to drive.
No person is perfect, and by extension, neither is any company. But the lack of creative thinking, the inability to deal with anything slightly out of the ordinary or make a big effort for the customer is making it harder to do business in the U.S. Our Israeli SIM cards generally do not work here, but all of our confirmation codes from Amazon, Apple, and others are sent to the numbers associated with those cards. In Israel, the local rep for Apple will not honor warranties for phones or other devices bought outside of the country. So while Apple is a transnational company, it is dependent on many local vendors for sales and service. When Apple had a mandatory recall of iPhone 13 units, the Israeli lab would not take any device that was purchased in the U.S. My sister-in-law had to fight tooth and nail to get service for a problem that Apple had created.
Honest competition is supposed to reward the effective companies that provide what consumers want, while putting out of business inefficient and lethargic competitors. What I see more frequently is that clueless companies do just fine and the pressure of the market seems inert in punishing them for their incompetence, inefficiency, or ineptitude. It was a shock—and it has happened twice—to sit in a bank branch and have someone on the phone say that we don’t know who you are two minutes after an employee of the same bank had positively identified the person based on government identity cards and proper PIN and passed along her conclusions to her colleague on the same phone. They claim to want to protect our money, but they live in a box and don’t know how to deal with someone traveling who does not have access to his primary cellphone number.
I hope that in the second era of Trump, U.S. companies will become more nimble and consumer-friendly. I would rather see the Rockies than spend another couple of hours in one more branch of our bank.
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