E-Commerce and Lack of Empathy
A social disease is pervasively infecting the current generation — ‘Lack of Empathy for the working-class’; the disease must be diagnosed to develop an effective therapy. E-commerce, a boon for our generation is proving to be a bane for the working class.
Ever wondered about the journey of a good purchased online from the seller to the purchaser. How, just after a few clicks on your mobile phone, the product magically appears at your doorstep?
Sadly, there is no magic involved — it is a result of real physical activities performed independently but sequentially, aggregated together by software algorithms, creating an invisible assembly line, that originates at the seller’s premises and terminates at the buyer’s doorstep.
This elaborate process has several virtues like increased options and the best price available for the buyer; however, the most significant utility is the preservation of time and effort.
But, how come such virtuous tool results in such grave loss of human moral — empathy.
Economics of E-Commerce Market and depressed service charges of Labour Class:
An e-commerce platform provides the buyer with invariably infinitely more options than a brick and mortar store at relatively discounted prices.
As soon as we purchase a product online, the two ends of the supply chain — the buyer and seller — are connected, who might be sitting literally poles apart. The product then travels on wagons, in containers, through land and/or sea and/or air being loaded, unloaded, making stops at several warehouses, before reaching the final delivery agent, who delivers the product at buyer’s doorstep in-person.
Then what is happening here — before reaching us, we have effectively purchased the product as well as the delivery ‘service’ involving physical human effort. Yet somehow, we are getting the product at lower prices. How come such a tangible service is virtually free of cost?
Here we need to perceive the competition of the e-commerce industry and the optimization of logistics cost or in crude language — who pays the least for performing the most laborious exercise of this business i.e. the physical movement and delivery of product from the seller to the buyer. The ‘optimization’ invariably comes at the cost of human effort being wrung. In a country with an infinite reservoir of young unemployed population; the aggregator needs to pay just what a jobless person will accept — thus the price of this physical labour is automatically set at rock-bottom wages.
Price Vs Value:
The premise that ‘anything valuable must have a price’ has been replaced by an evil corollary that ‘anything that is cheap must have no value’.
A primitive understanding of supply and demand relation is enough to comprehend that the suppressed prices of these valuable labour services are only due to the accident of birth of the service provider in a job-devoid, highly populated country; not because what they provide is of low value.
Birth of a comfort class out of the Online Shoppers:
Well, the business model due to its ease of starting up the machinery in favour of the buyer, the buyer’s physical effort is literally brought down to ‘Zero’.
* S/he need not prepare a shopping list since the marketplace can be visited repeatedly and effortlessly
* S/he need not step out to the grocery store for shopping
* S/he need not look for cabs or save cab drivers’ number
* S/he need not visit a restaurant, who was visited for hospitality as well as the food
This has saved a lot of time of energy for the consumer. Alas, this preserved time and energy rarely translates into anything purposeful or developing a new ‘hobby’.
The reason is that a significant part of this ‘preserved time’ is snatched back by these platforms. Just like a traditional marketplace, the competitiveness of an e-commerce aggregator platform rests on consumers visiting the market repeatedly. The higher the visitors, the more is the leverage enjoyed by the aggregator and the more is the commission that can be extracted from the sellers.
Some portion of this commission is then passed on to the unsuspecting consumers as discounts through rather insulting, and hypnotizing offers labeled as ‘Last Minute Deals’, ‘Take it or leave it’, ‘You would be fool to miss this’, ‘Buy Now-Pay Later’, making them buy things, not for their use, rather for the deal. Their only sigh of satisfaction is the ‘intelligent’ purchase which they made; unsuspecting that these ‘intelligent’ deals repeatedly present themselves dug out of their own mobile usage history, which the aggregator platform has arm-twisted the customer into granting in the guise of ‘necessary permissions’.
Looking for things itself becomes so gratifying that online shopping is a ‘hobby’ of the current generation. Such is the hypnotic effect of these offers that consumers end up going to the extent of purchasing products with money that they don’t possess right now (credit cards).
This combined with the predation of aggregators discount traps, leads to a dangerous cycle, which culminates in Conspicuous consumption — a practice wherein goods are owned not for their direct utility rather as a means of signalling social and economic status. The climax is people buying things which they don’t need with the money they don’t have.
The ‘Preserved’ Energy and Start of Un-empathy:
But what about the ‘preserved energy’. Well, the misdirection of this preserved energy is the root of the loss of human empathy.
The business model of e-commerce, due to its ease of starting up the machinery in favor of the buyer, the buyer’s physical effort is literally brought down to ‘Zero’.
When the buyer purchases a product on an e-commerce platform, he is made to have a dominating feeling that the service along with the product is paid for in advance and nothing else need to be provided — by extension, not even empathy; whether it is Flipkart or Zomato, where we avoid tipping the delivery guy or the OLA driver, who we rarely strike a conversation with.
This newfound taste of getting things done without effort is as gratifying as it is addictive — therefore, the comfort class starts to seek more and more comfort, whether it is Flipkart delivery person, who we expect to walk up to the flat door, just reaching the apartment isn’t enough or it the OLA driver, who we expect to load and unload our luggage in the vehicle cabin, although he never agreed to do so.
Since the current generation finds no utility in human interfaces, they remain indifferent to the physical efforts. This problem keeps compounding as it feeds on itself. The physical efforts, since are rarely performed by the comfort class themselves, have lost any respect for the cheap labour service. And the working class, who perform these tasks for us at depressed wages, are highly disregarded.
This lack of respect and empathy once rooted, dangerously branches out to all other spheres of life, wherein the comfort class keeps on feeding on more and more comfort at the expense of labour class, working more and more — whether it the housemaid, or the driver — the comfort class satisfies itself with superiority of having paid for the services and see no need for empathy.
The Treatment:
Once we have diagnosed the root cause, we can come up with an effective therapy:
First, we should shop for our needs rather than deals. An effective way to do this is making a shopping list for our requirements weekly or monthly and then shop for them, rather than loitering around the seductive online marketplace. This can enable us to make time for pursuing a real hobby.
Secondly, in this comfort-enabled world, it would not harm us, if we go out for our need every once in a while without the crutch of online service providers, so that we begin to value the services which we are provided by the labourer class.
Finally, we must then acknowledge that the labourers are providing us with valuable services at suppressed prices; the least we can do is to show them some empathy — and the best part is “IT IS ABSOLUTELY FREE”.
