consumer control

I am not thinking about people who eat at McDonald’s when I think about consumers.

Nonetheless, I have been reading about McDonald’s updates to its Happy Meal. It seems safe to say that almost anyone who pays attention at all to nutrition when sitting down to a meal receives this news with the skepticism it no doubt deserves. The change, as far as I can tell, amounts to throwing a few peeled apple slices into the mix and billing it as the new healthy Happy Meal. It would be an enormous surprise to find anything else.

And you know, there is a time and a place for the occasional old fashioned unhealthy Happy Meal with its plastic junk and french fries. It is great. The thing is, McDonald’s and its imitators do not fill the market now for birthday parties and fun outings so much as they dominate the easy-to-pick-up meal market. In that world, we consumers have little choice. And that is terrible.

I wish–over and over–that some other entirely different-minded and not-too-expensive healthy food service could put in a damned drive-through and go nationwide, even in the dinky little places that seem unlikely to produce customers.

Seriously.

The need for fast and easy is real, like it or not. You know the scenario: the baby finally fell asleep in the car seat–a situation that is about to come undone because the four year old has not had lunch yet, and that appointment that was supposed to end at 11:30 lasted instead until 1:00, and we are crabby, still another hour from home, and the apple (unpeeled) and the cheese cubes are all gone and have been since 11:45. Sure, parents should have planned better. But they don’t. Stuff happens. The golden arches loom, and short of leaving the kids in the car to run into a grocery store–a risky deed that will not go unpunished, I assure you–there is no choice in most places.

But as I said, I am not thinking about McDonald’s when I think about consumers.

I am thinking about healthcare. I am thinking about home-based services. I am thinking about the concept of consumer control. McDonald’s does not understand or care. Indeed, they do not have to. We as a society do not understand it either. We as individuals might care.

Those who do not have control and want it do understand it very well and care very much. Some of us stand on soapboxes with our great ideas, and some of us never give up. The agencies that really have the control form consortia that are supposed to bring people to the same table to discuss these issues, to meet needs better.

We so rarely find something so simple as… cash, coordination, and resources. In fact, we do a terrible job of meeting individual needs, and instead rely on what is available from a menu whose whole creation was skewed in the first place, based on whatever group happened to win its point on the day the menu was created. Too often, we “take care of” our consumers by serving them the default, whether they want it or not. We complain if they refuse to take it, too: “refusing services” setting off red flags all over the place, especially if the person involved is over 60 or under 18.

Fact is, we assume that people who cannot do some things without assistance cannot do anything without assistance, including knowing what they want. We make condescending forms for them to fill out, and forget that they are individuals who have probably seen and done far more in their lives, made life-altering decisions, fought in wars, raised families, had their hearts broken, advocated for themselves enough for us–the “services”–to be sitting in their living rooms. Or they are families who have already sat in countless doctors’ offices and faced the glaring eyes of judgment, still not quite sure what the future will bring. We try to help them with everything they do not want, from the “recommended” service plan to unsolicited advice (while our foot is in the door) about “making good choices”.

We come in with our healthy happy meals and expect for people to take them thankfully. And if not… well, then, at least they have to order from the menu. Let me get the menu out. The fact that there is a menu at all is the same as consumer control. Right?

We assume that consumers should be grateful when we give a small, peeled slice of what they keep telling us they truly want and need, and pat ourselves on our holy backs when they say “Thank you.” We pat ourselves on the back when they call us back and ask for more, when they pull up to the drive-in and order another happy meal. They may be doing it in resignation, but they keep coming back, and we fool ourselves into thinking we have been successful. If we are particularly out-of-touch, we take credit for saving people.

This is consumer control?

More please.

Please. I rant. I know it, and I know that change is slow. I know that every time we do create opportunities for more consumer control, we get a little closer to something better. Some things work well, some incredibly well. I want the world to change right now, for us never to assume that a person over 70 wants to be called “honey” and for people to stop patting my son on the head when he is in his wheelchair. I want to say yes when someone asks me if I know where, or how. I rant, because I don’t want to save anyone, and I hope I have the sense to quit my job the second I think I can. The power is theirs. I want to listen. I want to tell a story. I want to discover. I want to create.

hello

It is summer, glorious now in the brilliant clear days that seem so uncharacteristic of my youthful summers, or even those recent ones, but of the rare days in Vermont sometime after the mud and before the bugs. Surely these are rare days.

There could not have been so many days that seem to inhabit my memories of summer, but somewhere in the mid-1970s I can think of nothing but nerf balls and chlorine and Seals and Crofts, Gordon Lightfoot, more. The radio, not what we could hear at home, but what the lifeguards put on at the pool, floods my thoughts now.

And I am transported immediately back to floating in the cool water when I hear the one-two-three-four”hello it’s me” coming from my own car stereo, realizing that I put it there, on that album I had in the glove box.

It hit me then: Todd Rundgren is a genius. He transports me not so much to a swimming pool in my head as to a now-too-rare feeling, that teenage feeling of hearing a song and thinking, “Yes, yes, that’s exactly what it’s like,” and then thinking how marvelous it all is that a song could so accurately capture that feeling, that experience that means something entirely different to the next person–or even to me now, me then–and is therefore universal, and perfect, and worthy of playing over and over, at least for a while, until the feeling fades and other things move in.. until later when the song plays again and is all the stronger then for the repetition, and the memory of that, too.

I used to think a lot about music. I used to analyze what was going on, know all about the bands and the writers. And I was indeed curious enough then to go poking around Todd’s intriguing website. Maybe my zeal in this has faded over the years. Or maybe I just don’t care. But it still fascinates me that we can create, we can change lives, frame them, make them something more beautiful, and lasting, just by stepping out, by letting ourselves do it.