DailyPost 1043
PACKAGED!
Package, combo, offers, rewards, points, free servicing etc have been designed ingeniously by the businesses, small and big, to give you the feeling, that you are the winner and the beneficiary and you have got a better of them. Businesses don’t run on philanthropy of any kind. Maximisation of profit has for long remained the only goal of business. They have found ways and means to camouflage this harsh fact and have been successful in providing ways and means of rational thought to the gullible customers, trying to sell a feeling that they are authentic to the core.
Package tours were the only package we remember when we were young. Between tours then to today, every single business transaction seems to have been completely mired in a business initiative called package, which may be as many names as the number of items itself. It has gone to the extent that a combination of different food items have a different price than being bought separately. Infinite would be the number of the combinations in the food / restaurant industry. Domino’s pizza had added a new dimension of a prescheduled delivery time, failing which it would be delivered free. Who gains all of us know, but we want to believe that we have gained out of it.
While some parts of the world are becoming cardless, we keep carrying cards of even shops and enterprises, maintaining points and what not, while we still are not very clear about the transaction cost of different types of payments or money withdrawals coming out of our time tested credit cards. Data have also become a part of being packaged. It’s told that Decathlon does not sell, if you don’t provide them with your mobile number. Who gains we all know but we have decided to accept that its fair.
These packages in harsh terms can be to sell old goods or maximising food profit margins or hiking service prices or for numerous other indirect benefits, which suits the business enterprises for the calculations best known to them. Over a period of time, all have joined this bandwagon, each trying to out beat the other. The customer is permanently in this Chakravayhu, trying desperately to find out what is most beneficial to him, till he finally resigns to his fate. This is what they always wanted.
THE FINAL PACKAGE IS THE USER PACKAGED.
Sanjay Sahay