Free market means "free to screw the customer" even in healthcare

The following anecdote doesn't mean a thing outside the corporate structure of any business enterprise. How far down the line is the real customer compared to the CEO, CFO, COO, their staffs, top consultants and finally the stockholders. Who competes for the customer, really? How many other stories have we heard daily and yet we are unable to connect the dots. If we could only invest and not consume anything...

Free market means "free to screw the customer"

You've got to love the American approach to homo economicus these days:caveat frigging emptor. Instead of a nice, mutually understood premise -- I pay you money, you give me what I'm paying you for -- you get the customer acting on one premise and the business deciding whether or not to honor it. Take, for example, my latest foray into the fun world of corporations killing my intrinsic polyphasic field just a little:

My wife wanted to send her mother flowers for Mother's Day. So, she ordered "Pure Enchantment," a bouquet of lilies and purple flowers in a glass vase, from FTD.com. What her mother received was pink and white carnations in a plastic vase. Now, there's a certain degree of "we can't guarantee full seasonal availability" to this, which any reasonable person will accept. That, however, is not the problem here. My wife called up FTD to discuss the complete and utter failure to deliver a bouquet remotely resembling the one we paid for. After being offerred copious coupons for percentages off of future orders -- as if that was a reasonable response ("Spend more money, please, so we can apologize!") -- she called the florist in Albuquerque directly.

Now, what the florist had to say is what got my blood up. Apparently FTD does not provide a style book to its florists, or detailed instructions, or pictures, or even something along the lines of "hey, put a bunch of lilies and some purplish stuff in a glass vase." Nope. There's no real way, apparently, to be guaranteed you will get even an appropriate approximation of your order. The florist told my wife that the order states the name of the bouquet so, if you're lucky, the picture of the bouquet is still on the website so they can at least look the damn thing up. We were unlucky, and the Mother's Day bouquets were off the site by Mother's Day, when the damn thing was to be assembled.