I’m dealing with this infinite loop chatbot with Verizon right now haha. My number port to become a Verizon customer was supposed to take 4-24 hours. Ten days later still nothing. Chatbot asks me for topics to help with, put in my number but it’s not a Verizon number (it’s mid port) so they recommend I register, I try to register and I cannot because my number isn’t a Verizon number, so back to the chatbot about my problem, they need me to login for further help, but I can’t login without a Verizon number… ad infinitum. It’s maddening and have tried several times to get on the phone with a customer service human being, but after 90 minutes on hold several times nothing.

So I’m in this weird limbo that I think could be solved by a customer rep chat in minutes.

Just an example of automated chatbots being only programmed for a couple common situations and not things like, “I’m a pseudo Verizon customer who is receiving bills but has no phone number with Verizon.”

It's Verizon's choice not to compensate someone fairly to deal with all the abusive folks that call up customer support - and to have company policies that force people to turn to CS out of desperation. I think it's perfectly fair for people to refuse to work phones for minimum wage and I think it's also perfectly fair for you, who probably pays hundreds of dollars a month to this company for the services that might run them tens of dollars to offer on a technical level - to expect the company to divert more of their profits to actually providing a good customer experience.

In some businesses the margins are so tight that increased CS costs will put them under - the answer for those businesses is, unfortunately, to go under. However, everyone that's left should be held to a reasonable standard - maybe companies will start levying "Abusive customer" charges on especially painful support calls and piss off a small portion of their customer base while keeping the vast majority happy and well served - maybe they'll just up their charges across the board (or cut the costs into their profits) - that's up to them. What's up to you is the choice to cease being a customer[1] you can chose to discontinue your services with them - and if they have difficulties closing your account or continue to charge you erroneously for services... then you can reverse charges and report the behavior to whatever passes for a better business bureau in your neck of the woods.

Dealing with crap CS is a cost that companies are currently levying on customers because they can - but you can refuse to play their game.

1. Unless you're living in a service monopoly in which case - shake your fists at the heavens, bend over, and consider moving to some country with sane anti-monopoly laws.

But what happens when all the phone companies go out of business because of this?

We all decide that a planned economy is the only way to move forward? If market forces have any influence and companies are actually going out of business due to poor customer service than someone should switch strategies to actually offer non-terrible customer service.

So funny, off topic story with Verizon. I ported my number from them years ago. Which ended me up in the same exact situation. I couldn’t log in or anything. So I sent them $800 just to make sure I covered my early termination fees since I couldn’t log in to see a bill and I had paperless billing on. Fast forward 6 months later and I get a call from their debt collections for $600. I asked where the $800 went. They didn’t know but I owed them money. I disputed it on my credit report and it vanished. Another six months and I get a call again, almost same conversation but at the end of it, they sent me a check for almost $200. It was great. I’m never doing business with them again though.

I just went through an absolute debacle with my phone number being in limbo and no customer reps being able to access the account. Submit a complaint to the better business bureau within a day or two executive services will contact you via email. They resolved my issue, it still took a few more days but it worked without spending even more time chatting to bots and reps who simply do not have the power to resolve the issue.

I'm in a walmart the order is still processing loop.

this has already happened in the food service industry. McDonalds used to hire a lot of teenagers; for many it was their first job. When minimum wage went up sufficiently high enough they replaced human labour with self-serve kiosks and reduced staff to a single register and kitchen staff. Tim Hortons switched to centralized bakeries and terminated all store-level bakers.

I'm not arguing either side of this, just that there are very real impacts. It's not a situation where every entry-level job is going to be floated by a rising tide, some people will drown.

As a Canadian - I can comment that Tim Hortons has notoriously terrible baked goods. You might grab a breakfast sandwich there (and a lot of people are weirdly enamored with their coffee) but they can't even compete when it comes to baked goods in most metro areas - they're a coffee shop and we have much better alternatives for baked goods. The cost to them for cutting bakers was to gradually lose their position as a purveyor of donuts in Canada.

Can we blame that on minimum wages going up, or can we blame it on McDonald's find a cost-effective way to automate that? Do we find no kiosk in those states who haven't had a minimum wage hike?

Turning your example around: if those teens were to receive UBI and McDonalds could hire them for only $3/hour instead of having to pay them full wage, some of the self-service kiosks might not have appeared, and the customers might have encountered better motivated workers?

Who would take a job for significantly less than they receive from the government?

The U in UBI stands for universal: everyone gets the same amount, regardless of whether they have a job. Taking a job is additive with UBI, there is no "significantly less money".

Under UBI, a government could do away with minimum wage completely because there is no coercion by necessity. The employer only needs to pay enough to make it worthwhile for the employee to show up.

+1

Using UBI to eliminating minimum wage, government unemployment insurance, and other problematic/expensive programs is one of my favorite parts of UBI.

Some short-term unemployment insurance would likely still exist under UBI - the two programs have sharply different goals, and a viable UBI would generally be too low for a "full" income. But UBI would almost certainly allow for more flexibility in the labor market, that would make extended UI a lot less relevant.

That only follows with a theoretically perfect UBI which either matches everyone at the highest COL or matches everyone with their local COL and reacts instantaneously with increases due to changes in the market.

If there is a delay in UBI increases, or if the UBI is not properly matched to the COL, there will still be pockets of people who must work by necessity.

> The employer only needs to pay enough to make it worthwhile for the employee to show up.

That's exactly my point—why would you show up to a job that pays you less than you receive by default? It doesn't make sense to go from working 0 hours to working 40 for a less than 50% increase in income.