Getting Service; A Painful Experience

At the end of May, we were driving to Minnesota to open up our cabin.  A car in front of us threw a stone early in the trip and cracked our windshield.  Hey, stuff happens.  My first job out of college was with 3M.  Occasionally I would call on auto glass shops and sell them stuff.  I am familiar with how to change a windshield.   As soon as it happened, my stomach dropped.  I was prepared for a challenge because our car is a Porsche Cayenne.  High-end cars cause high-end problems.  Sometimes getting the oil changed is tough depending on where you are in the country.  I remember once when we had our BMW X5 and had a tire blowout in Spartanburg, SC.  I figured they had to have an inventory of tires there since that’s where the factory that built them was.  Au contraire, 50-mile drive to a place that could change a tire.  Thank goodness for run flat tires.

We called our insurance guy.  Of course, you don’t call a “guy” anymore, you get an automated assistant.  We knew it was going to be a while since they probably weren’t going to have a technician able to do the work in the far northern territories of Minnesota.  Finally, we did speak with a person that hooked us up with Safelight.  Safelight took a week to book an appointment, came out and brought the wrong glass.  After taking a photo, and writing down a bunch of things, came out again, wrong glass.  I couldn’t go to the dealer and have them change it which would have been the best option.  I suppose I could go, but then the expense would have been all out of pocket.

I redialed our insurance.  After jumping through the prompts finally talked to a person to try and different glass installer, Gerber.  There was a shop near my home so I could easily drive to it.  After being on the phone with Gerber, they decided to get glass from the dealer.  They told me to go in Monday, today.  Of course, when I got to the shop no one had heard of it and the glass part of Gerber isn’t connected to the body shop part of Gerber.  When you called the internet location for the Gerber shop you got the nationwide number.  Even the person at the shop couldn’t call anyone to find out if they actually had the glass and could install it.

I was nice about it and she was helpful, giving me the number of a private glass shop who might be able to get the glass and do the work.

Now I am waiting for my insurance office to open so I can talk to a person to see if I could use a private shop to do the repair.  I don’t want to speak to a robot again.

Robots can do a lot of commodity tasks.  With all the talk about tariffs and China, the thing the Chinese might really need to worry about is the robot army. In the link, the paper analyzes the effects of exposure to industrial robots in the Chinese labor market. Using aggregate data from Chinese prefectural cities (2000-2016) and individual longitudinal data from China, they find a large negative impact of robot exposure on employment and wages of Chinese workers. Effects are concentrated in the state-owned sector and are larger among low-skilled, male, and prime-age and older workers. Furthermore, they find evidence that exposure to robots affected internal mobility and increased the number of labor-related strikes and protests.

If we think about the “time is money” concept, the economics of using robots might weigh in favor of using humans for some tasks.

When we think about the future of work, we always think about saving on labor costs since that is the highest input cost of production.  The Navy is trying it on warships.  It’s not working as they thought it would work so far and is diminishing their ability to fight.  We think and we have been taught that doggedness, determination and above all being conscientious in our work wins the day.  Some call it grit.  That person behind the desk at Gerber glass is certainly conscientious.  She does her job well.  But, she showed some flexibility when she recommended a private glass shop.  It was the right call.  In situations that are stable, rigid adherence to routine is probably the best option. But in situations with rapidly changing rules and roles, a small but growing body of evidence now suggests that it can leave you ill-equipped.

In my investing experience, I had a company blow up over the philosophical differences between using humans versus software to scale.  Kapow went kaboom when investors made a lot of poor choices around financing and strategy.

I am hoping to get my glass changed today.  Let’s see if the human approach works better than the automated one.