Coming off an 18 hour trip to Shanghai, we were met by an energetic and intelligent young student, who accompanied us to our hotel. The cab driver told the student he knew right where the hotel was. Since we had stayed there several times, Blanche recognized that he was taking us on a very circuitous route in order to check up his bill. The student later told us that his accent revealed that he was not in any of Shanghai. As a result, the driver regarded him as a foreigner to, someone whom he could legitimately take advantage of. We arrived at the hotel, only to be told that the room, we had reserved was not available for us; but that we could spend the night in an unrenovated room, then move into our room the next day. I didn't care about the quality of the room. We were just going to lay down and go to bed; however, the hotel did the same thing to us the last time. In addition, I didn't look forward to unpacking bunch of stuff and having to repack the next morning.
The young staff explained various motivations for our treatment. Because management receives bonuses for filling the hotel up to capacity, overbooking increases their chance of collecting the bonuses. We were also told that most of the booking is done by the web and the company does not shut off booking when the reservations overflow. After a long argument with the manager, he gave us a more lucid explanation. He said that many people want to stay at the hotel, and that we were not important enough to be of any concern for him. He was right. We aren't important. And his concern is increasing his income. The minor inconveniences and ripoffs that we experience are nothing compared to what most of the world experiences. They do, however, illustrate the nastiness embedded in the capitalist mode of production. As a trained economists, long tutored in the ideology of capitalism maximizing utils, I am amused by my educational experience. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
