Apology not accepted and it really is kind of silly

This week’s post is a bit of a digression from the rants, raves and commentary on the hedge fund industry and Wall Street, but worth the read nonetheless.

It seems like every time I turn on TV there are apology ads for Wells Fargo and Facebook for the way they have cheated customers and manipulated their data.  The ads, I think, are meant to try to instill some sense of security that both companies understand their errors, have fixed the problems and, well,  say we won’t do it again.

Is it me or this just plain silly?

First of all, the trust has been broken and while I am sure it can be salvaged, cheesy ads with outdated ATMs and comments about “friends” from junior high is not how you fix it. And second, who are the folks who listened to these Mad Men/Women and bought the idea that it was good idea to continually berate the American consumer over and over again with their past bad deeds?

I can believe that the folks at Sterling Cooper or some similar agency would have suggested going this route and but the fact that the senior execs of both Facebook and Wells Fargo bought into it – well, that is quite discouraging. Companies make mistakes over and over again, some a lot worse than others. But to keep apologizing for these significant screw ups – is, well to put it bluntly, a mistake in itself.

Things that drive me crazy

As loyal readers to this blog know, over the years I have had significant problems with Comcast. The company continuously failed to deliver on its service and after two years, I switched to AT&T. The service is better, more reliable and, while it does not have all the  features of Comcast, the fact that it works is quite a plus. Recently, however, I had a significant outage and the good people at AT&T sent a crack team of technicians to solve the problem. It took them some time and resulted in a replacement of quite a bit of equipment – but they got it done. What made it so fascinating was that they really seemed to care about getting it right and worked to do so. This is something unusual, compared to Comcast and many other companies, and is appreciated by this consumer.