Make Corporate America Great Again

Editor's Note

The ascendance of wokeness in corporate America has led to undeniable declines in customer service and quality of life for Americans going about their daily business. Peachy Keenan surveys the state of affairs and concludes that political success is not a sufficient victory — conservatives must retake the private sector, too, if they hope to restore and secure the American way of life.

Last year, after that Alaska Airlines jet lost a door plug in midair, I wrote about an even more destructive decompression event: the explosion of DEI hiring in the airline industry. Did race- and gender-based hiring practices degrade safety, oversight, and manufacturing prowess at Boeing and its suppliers? 

Obviously, yes.

Boeing has already outsourced much of that plane’s design and production to companies infected with DEI. On the website of aircraft part maker Spirit Aerosystems, it’s hard to discern what the company actually does — besides hire and celebrate diverse employees. The aircraft parts they make, the ones people’s lives depend on, seem to come second.

The advance of the ESG-DEI movement has degraded quality across the board. The internet is a sea of complaints about formerly great American companies now plagued by bad service, inferior products, and noticeable quality declines. The cell phones don’t work as well as they used to. Try finding a charger that lasts more than two weeks. That new dishwasher from Best Buy might not make it through the holidays. Why did the ice maker in the LG fridge decide to quit after three months? How come my favorite fast-food place just jacked up the prices and made the nuggets smaller? 

The self-checkout machines at Target work, until you need to delete an item or buy a gift card or get a security tag removed from a t-shirt. Now, they’re starting to shut down those self-checkout machines due to rampant shoplifting. But they haven’t re-opened the human check-out lines or hired more cashiers. 

Starbucks coffee is terrible. And why can’t the blue-haired nose-ring freaks behind the counter at least smile and say hello and thank you as they take your money? It can’t be impossible to require this of people. Or is it?

The examples could go on, but the airline industry is perhaps the most visible, visceral example of the eroding of basic corporate obligations to the end user. 

I propose a simple fix to avoid more unfortunate incidents in the air: Merit Air, a new airline that requires stringent testing and competency across all facets of the company. From pilots to engineers to manufacturers to maintenance crews, the only hiring metrics would be experience, proficiency, skill, and competence. 

Last month, no-frills Spirit Airlines announced it was preparing for bankruptcy. Not a huge surprise, if you’ve seen any of the fistfight videos taken on Spirit flights. It was kept airborne for a few extra years thanks to the fraudulent PPP loans a lot of Spirit customers used to take Covid vacays, but the party’s over now. “Spirit has been struggling with losses and declining revenue since the pandemic.” Spirit is notorious for low prices and even lower service; its bankruptcy is proof that, in the end, people will pay a little extra for the frills that really do make the difference between abject misery and basic survival.  

I was hoping for this, actually. Now is the chance for someone (ahem) to buy an entire airline, rebrand it, and rebuild it from the ground up as a merit-based institution, where every employee is hired based on competency, and comfort and service are prioritized again. What’s the point of paying for first class on United when the pilots are DEI hires and the crew treats passengers like cargo? 

Instead, just imagine an airline that guarantees uber-qualified flight crews and friendly service — maybe even background checks on the other passengers! Imagine boarding a plane knowing your flight won’t be interrupted by newly released felons who just spent six hours at the airport bar and decide it’s time to open the airplane door somewhere over Cleveland. When I board a plane, I want to know I won’t have to team up with my seatmate to duct tape a lunatic to their seat.

X Airlines, where are you?

And how about your wireless carrier — are you happy with them? Last summer, I switched our home internet provider from AT&T to Verizon because of some deal I saw. Verizon internet was supposed to be like 1 billion megabits per second; we got like 10. Suddenly, I had turned the clock in my household back to 1999 as dial-up speeds took over. Web pages took 45 minutes to load. The spinning wheel spun and spun. 

I spent approximately 8,000 hours attempting to fix this problem on the phone and on the Verizon website’s “live chat” feature. Every person on the phone had an accent so thick I could barely understand them as they promised “I will be the last person you need to talk to about this issue.” The “live chat” people also kept making that promise. And yet the speed never improved, nothing was ever fixed, and no one offered to lower the bill or refund my money. 

Last week I switched back to AT&T. It was like opening the door into Oz: everything was suddenly back in color. 

Another example: Private equity firm Apollo Global Management bought the alarm companies ADT and Protection One in 2016. Our formerly great home security system became a shambles, and when I would call to get service or new window sensors replaced after they fell off doors, I was presented with a long list of charges and hourly rates for repairs. Alarms would beep for no reason, and we got no helpful tips on how to disarm them when we called. After removing the batteries from the control panels, and then being told we’d have to pay to get them repaired, I gave up and hired a local company to replace the system. 

Corporate America is not a government or an institution, but it runs basically everything in our daily lives: how you travel, how well your phone and your internet work, the entire shopping experience. Thanks to massive private equity firms acquiring any company not nailed down, firing the quality control departments and installing DEI departments, and outsourcing as much labor as possible to Indian call centers and sub-par third-party vendors, these crucial services are barely hanging on. It’s not just a competency crisis; it’s shrinkflation writ large. Massive decline at every “consumer touchpoint,” as the ad people say. 

Baseline decent service is now a luxury good. If you want your flight attendant to pretend she doesn’t hate you, that’s $75 extra. The customer service team is busy helping other customers, so it’s a 75 hour wait. Sending a technician to your house will be $2,500 an hour. Or you can use the free live chat! This will be the last person you talk to about your issue, because you will commit suicide three hours in.

This is a national crisis, and it requires a national response. We need a DOGE for business — not for efficiency, but for quality and service. A Department of Business Excellence. 

Yes, we want the government to run more like a business. But we also need our businesses to be run more like, well, businesses. It’s time to make American companies great again.