To AAA or not AAA?
There was a good comment thread on a post recently that had to do with one of our bloggers possibly signing up for AAA’s roadside assistance program, and it got me thinking about where and how I consume. Some of the comments about AAA pointed to political/environmental reasons not to give them money, some of which (okay, many of which) were valid points that gave me some pause regarding my long-term membership with AAA. But it also made me think about the other factors involved in being a customer or a consumer that go into making a decision about what and how to buy the things that I consume and the costs, both immediate and long-term, that go into those decisions.
And as I’m still an AAA customer today, I’m going to try to explain why that is.
Part of it just has to do with the fact that if you look hard enough, you’re likely to find something not to like about just about everywhere you shop, everything you do for entertainment, and everything you eat. And I like to eat, drink, and buy stuff sometimes. And sometimes, shhhh, I like to buy things on sale and will maybe even go somewhere that I don’t usually shop if I know I can get a good discount. Does that necessarily make me evil? I don’t really want to live in a mud hut wearing a canvas sack and eating bugs and tubers for the rest of my life, so if that means you need to throw a stone, go to. I know that’s an extreme end to this question, but isn’t that where you head once you’re on this slippery a slope? Where does the line get drawn?
But there are limits to this turning of a semi-blind eye to a business’ practices, even if they don’t always make sense. For instance, I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. I just don’t. Part of that has to do with the fact that they are actually evil, but that’s not all of it; I’ve been known to scarf a Filet-O-Fish or two in my day, and we all know McDonald’s is one of the main purveyors of Satan on this earth. But besides the political aspect, part of the reason I don’t shop at Wal-Mart is the same reason I am still a AAA customer, and that has to do with service, both my own and that of their employees. It’s pretty widely known, I think, that Wal-Mart’s pretty shitty to their employees and the communities they descend upon, and that, I imagine, though I’ve never shopped there and no matter what their commercials say, translates into shitty customer service. And this can be applied just about everywhere: Do you go back to a restaurant where you get bad food or bad service or both? My guess is that you don’t; but what if you knew that the owner’s political affiliation happened to correspond exactly with your own, you went to the same meetings, you were involved in the same community groups; would you be more likely then to go back to his crappy restaurant?
Or if you order something online and it fails to get delivered and then no one responds to your phone calls or e-mails, will you ever shop there again? Does it really make a difference what the politics of that company are?
So here’s the thing: Every time I’ve had to deal with AAA, and I mean every time, even during the three years I lived in L.A. and finding good customer service was the equivalent to getting touched by God, AAA has treated me well, dealt with my issue, and been happy to do so. I was in their office on Monday this week, and not only was I handled well, but you could tell that the people there were happy to be at work– on a Monday, no less. And if my slight contribution helps to keep those people, those employees and that company working and happy, then so be it, they’ve won me as a customer. And after all, I’m still voting for the guys that hopefully won’t be influenced by the AAA lobbyists when they get elected. And yeah, that’s a copout, but there it is.
But on the other side of a similar coin, there’s a new restaurant in town that’s supposed to be really good, it’s got a great reputation, it’s one of the restaurants of the moment. But I’ll never go there because I happen to know that the owner is a complete asshole to the people in the business directly next door to him, and I don’t want to give money to someone that treats people I know like that.
So I guess my line in the sand is a personal one rather than a political one in most cases. And while awareness of issues and principles politics is definitely a factor in where I do and/or should shop, it’s not the only one.
Related posts:
My experience with AAA is also 100% positive. Every single dealing I’ve had with them has been steller. I personally know one employee at the Clackamas office, and she loves to be there and she says her co-workers feel the same.
I don’t give a flip what they do with my money, because frankly I get far more from them out of that fifty-some dollars than they get from me.
I appreciate the honest attempt to explain your decision and the intentional way you weighed the competing factors. But I still disagree with it. Essentially you’re saying that you value good customer service over values such as corporate honesty, the environment, and the other factors detailed in the post you cited. Sure, sometimes there’s no avoiding bad choices, like when you go buy gas for your car, assuming you really need the car.
But that’s not the case here. There exists an environmentally responsible alternative to AAA — and it’s a local business, no less! When a morally superior alternative like Better World Club does exist, why not give it a try? If its service is so much worse, you can always go back. (IIRC, both AAA and BWC will refund your pro-rated membership fee upon request — AAA refunded mine when I switched to BWC.) If you’re not sure whether BWC contracts with tow truck drivers in isolated areas where you drive, why not call and ask them? What they told me is that they use the same local drivers AAA does. If you give your money to BWC instead of AAA, you’re still supporting the same number of employees, and encouraging AAA to alter its own policies.
Granted that AAA provides excellent customer service. Mussolini famously made the trains run on time in Italy, and many Italians apparently valued rail efficiency over abstractions like, say, democracy. Slavery sure gave us cheaper cotton because we didn’t have to pay those pesky pickers.
If we want things to change — if we want a cleaner environment, for example — we have to support the folks who are risking their livelihoods to make it happen. After all these years, some ethical entrepreneurs who happen to be our neighbors decide to put their money where their morals are, and yet too many of us won’t support them because the admittedly ethically bankrupt alternative provides the friendly service we should expect from every business. What kind of lesson does that teach would be entrepreneurs who want to practice socially responsible business and ethical capitalism? And then we’ll lament the fact that we seem to have no good choices available– geez, I wonder why?
This me-first attitude is typical of Americans these days. Just give us low prices, efficient service, tasty foods, and mindless entertainment, and we won’t bother to ask hard questions about who pays the price for our personal prosperity. We “don’t give a flip” about Third World sweatshops, wage- and union busting practices, environmental destruction. It’s all about selfish, short term interests rather than thinking about other people, including the kids who’ll suffer (asthma, obesity, environmental carcinogens, etc) as a result of policies that AAA helps make possible. As so many articles have documented, AAA’s money (and membership numbers from people mostly ignorant of its pernicious policies) speak far louder than your vote for a pro-environment representative who’s going to get elected in Portland anyway.
Just because we can’t make the right decision every single time (e.g. I know it’s more socially responsible to be vegetarian, but I’m too weak to stop eating salmon) , that doesn’t excuse us from making an ethically superior choice when it is possible. That’s like saying that, well, I regularly drive a few mph above the speed limit, so I guess there’s no point in obeying the laws against murder.
Nevertheless, I do applaud you for thoughtfully and forthrightly airing your decisionmaking process here and subjecting yourself to possible criticism. I hope you’ll reconsider your decision, though, and I hope others will do the research by checking out the BWC website and reading the articles posted there, and make up their own minds.
The moment I hit the words “morally superior alternative”, I stopped reading because I knew I was about to wade into subejctive self-righteous hooey.
I love AAA.
“subjective” that is.
That’s what happens when one posts in the middle of the night.
Why is it that there are people out there in comment land who feel it is ok to accuse writers of being facist and racist when they are writing about a topic? Yes Brett, I’m asking you. In your diatribe here, while you make some good points, you go off the deep end and make yourself look like an ass when you start making vague references to facism and slavery. I was surprised that you didn’t liken Jonash to Hitler. When you do that, no one remembers your point, they just remember rolling their eyes at the Mussolini reference.
This seems to be a common theme among a group of individual who disagree with the world.
I chuckled at Brett asking us to “do the research by checking out the BWC website and reading the articles posted there”.
Yeah, because the website from the company that’s going to sell you service is likely to be the most objective place to read about it.
While you’re at it, be sure to do the research by checking out the AAA website and reading the articles posted there.
The articles I’m referring tolinked on the BWC site are NOT written by BWC; they come from Harper’s, Sierra, and other independent journalistic sources. Agreed that it’s a good idea to check AAA’s site for responses, but be sure to distinguish between company PR and citations to reputable independent sources.
Sierra? As in the Sierra Club magazine? You’re killing me…
Ah, when the facts don’t fit your ideology, attack the source. Worked for Rove!
Which facts about AAA’s on-the-record lobbying efforts (paid for by members who mostly don’t know about its environmental stands) cited in the articles below are inaccurate?
http://www.usatoday.com/money/covers/2002-04-24-aaa.htm#more
http://www.nrdc.org/amicus/01win/aaa/aaa.asp
http://www.betterworldclub.com/articles/Harpers2002may.htm
http://www.sierraclub.org/e-files/roadside_assistance.asp
I read the articles you posted. I’ve yet to see what’s so evil about AAA. As a motorist tired of being stuck in traffic, I want to see wider roads and new bridges, both things which the environmentalists see as evil. AAA’s against mass transit… DUH! Why would you expect a group who gets their funding from car owners to go out and advocate for less cars?
It’s fine to say you don’t agree with AAA, but as a motorist, the fact that they push for roads and highway improvements sits just fine with me. Maybe I’m not the average member. But I’ve read what you posted, and can’t say I disagree with any of it.
But see, that’s what’s cool about BWC; they also get their money from drivers, and yet they manage to support anti-sprawl and pro-environment policies like reduced tailpipe emissions, which AAA lobbying helped kill. So it IS possible to practice business with a sense of community responsibility, and that’s why I prefer to send my money to BWC rather than AAA.
As for wider roads and new bridges reducing the time you spend stuck in traffic, I’ve read news reports (and no, I didn’t save them to disk so can’t provide links) of studies from urban planners that show that you can’t build your way out of gridlock; the more lanes you put in, the more cars fill it. When you look at places that tried to build their way out of gridlock — Seattle, LA, Houston — you find that the commute times go down at first, and quickly ratchet back up to previous levels and more. Having driven in all those cities (and others Portland’s size, like Austin, that tried the build-more-highways strategy), my experience confirms those results.
The only proven way to reduce gridlock is to spend more on alternatives to cars — and spend enough to make them sufficiently attractive that people will ride (bikes, trains, streetcars) alternatives instead of driving. Ultimately, that’ll cost less than building more highways, particularly with gas prices spiraling every upward now. BWC has even found a way to make money off car alternatives by offering a stranded biker pickups as well as stranded driver pickups.
Anyway, thanks for taking time to read the articles; we may disagree, but I appreciate your willingness to consider the arguments for the other side.
I have to disagree with your assessment of Austin, as I lived there for six years. Austin is not Portland’s size - it is considerably smaller in metro area population. Also, for the longest time, the city of Austin and Travis County refused to build any new roads or highways because the local yokels wanted to keep Austin as a “big small town”. Well, people kept coming, so the government *finally* relented and started building roads. But now, they’re way behind schedule and way behind where they should have been had they started road-building when they really needed to.
Austin still only has one interstate and one other major thoroughfare (MoPac) - both go north-south. There is no good way to go east-west anywhere in the heart of the city, between the north end (Research Blvd) and the south end (Ben White Blvd). That’s why Austin has gridlock most of the time - they rely on surface streets to get the vast majority of their cars around. Totally idiotic. The scary thing is that they want to be just like Portland. I ran screaming.
Anyhow, because Austin was so stupid when it came to their infrastructure, the population growth moved north to Williamson County (Round Rock), which is one of the fastest growing counties in the nation. Williamson County is happy to provide the infrastructure that the residents need and desire - unlike the People’s Republic of Travis County.
If you are concerned about Walmarts “shitty” treatment of employees & communities, then you should also be concerned about AAA’s treatment of their contractors. As I posted to Fishbone, the next time the AAA contractor comes to rescue you in the middle of the night, ask him how much he’s making & then figure what that will buy at the grocery store ( or Walmart for that matter). AAA will even admit a company cannot survive on AAA work alone; it has to be subsidized by commercial calls ( from hard working stiffs like the rest of us)…Gee, that kinda sounds like a gov’t plan!!
marsha, that’s a great point. and you didn’t compare me to a slaveholder, so I can’t dismiss it out of hand! damn your reasonability! at the same time, as a contractor myself not so long ago, i’m well aware of the difference between contract work and being an employee– the thing with Wal-Mart that rubs me so raw is that they don’t seem to feel any responsibility at all to people who ARE trying to get by just by working at their stores.
Oswego, I asked a friend who serves on the planning commission in Austin and has lived there all his life to respond to your post. Basically, he said the gridlock comes from the kind of sprawl development AAA encourages. Here’s his reply.
I have to disagree with just about every premise of this email. Austin has been pretty aggressive in its efforts to build roads; for a debunking of the myth about our falling behind on that, see http://www.sosalliance.org/transportation.shtml .
Yes, there has been vocal opposition to roads (as shown by that page); but the opposition has focused mainly on the building of roads over environmentally sensitive areas, where there are legitimate concerns about subsidizing further growth.
The logjams causing the most problems in Austin are on the N-S freeways, not on the E-W roads. Much of the congestion is due to growth in Williamson County and areas to the south, where there’s more cheap, available land.
If the argument is that Austin has sacrificed suburban development in defense of its central city, one look around - at 183 North, or at our parking garages downtown - should dispel that. But the argument shouldn’t be about central city vs. suburbs; it should be about building & maintaining appealing, livable communities, where daily needs are within easy reach. As a lifelong Austinite, I’d say Austin has done pretty well at that, and I hope we’re getting better at it all the time.
Well I think getting by is what most of us are trying to do. I don’t believe in arbitrary benes, or collecting a paycheck just b/c I showed up, but like Walmart, AAA limits most employees hours so they are not eligble for health insurance. And now I know why my dad would never stay in a motel with the AAA logo. It cost more b/c they had to make up for the discount they were obligated to give to the member ( just so they could display that logo)