Why we all pay the price for today’s racket culture

Age brings with it increasing aches and irritability, with a list of peeves that grows by the week.

I’ve got some hardy annuals that never abate, but they all come down to our capacity to give a damn.

Bankers, bean counters and traffic cops seem to be in perpetual competition for the bottom of my food chain.

I’m old enough to remember getting a diary at Christmas and having a personal banker who would squeeze an extra couple of bob out of the overdraft for you, when you needed to buy nappies or fix a leaking roof.

Diaries and personal bankers have gone the way of the dinosaur and branches will follow soon, but at this time of the year, you’re almost tripping over the incentives to get you to open an account – those that still have branches?

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There’s branded merch, pens, T-shirts, bags (gyms do the same), but you have to be a new customer.

There is no incentive for the loyal customer who finally managed to pay off their home loan or financed their car. There’s nothing for the poor sap still hitting the treadmill three times a week every week.

You can’t really blame the banks or the gyms, because everyone’s at it.

An aeon ago, on a different newspaper, I remember the circulation department offering everything from funeral policies to theatre tickets if you took out a subscription, but nothing for those whose families had been subscribing in an unbroken line since before the Rand Revolt in 1922.

The problem is that it becomes a race to the bottom. Most of us have wised up to this as consumers. The first thing you do when you get slapped with an above average annual increase is to cancel the service.

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It’s astonishing how many times you’ll get phoned back and get offered the same service you’ve just cancelled at less than what you were paying for it the previous month.

If they can afford to slash the price, why did they gouge the increase in the first place?

But perhaps the bigger question is why do we have to get ugly to get treated fairly?

It’s created a bizarre carousel of short-term profiteering that we are not only involved in, we are becoming inured to.

It’s a very short jump to from there to buying cool drinks for metro cops, or worse.

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We’ve got to stop it now.