How and Why American Business went from Manufacturing to Service

Many, in business will tell you that most things goes in cycles and because of that, this “funk” that American Business is in is only temporary.  Now make no mistake, I am no expert but I am smart enough to see that this is a bold-faced lie.  I hope to educate some as I make my case below.

Business first began as a healthy competition between two or more people who had the exact same skill set.  They would compete by no other means than better service.  Better service because they makers of things took enormous pride in the quality of their work.  It made them so proud of their work that they would gladly stand behind it and it made customer more comfortable because they knew if anything went wrong, they could take the product back and be treated with respect as their issues was immediately resolved.  This happened because the driving force behind business was the desires to succeed provide the public with a service sorely missing by neighborhood business minded people. Remember that guy who used to push a cart around the neighborhood and sharpen your knives and scissors?  That’s what I’m talking about.  They were more than happy to share their skills and knowledge about a particular subject because of this pride.  This is not the case today.

The next stage was to design and build better scissors which took longer to dull.  In order to do this business had to invest in a forgotten division which was pivotal to their success.  The division was later called Research and Development.  Research and Development spurred innovations, creativity and wondrous competition.  Fields, like science and engineering grew because of it and regular everyday people with an idea to improve any product was rampant and millionaires were made from those who thought outside the box.  This made many feel that regardless of where they were born, the color of their skin or the region from whence they hailed they could come up with an improvement and make it one day.  But like everything else, business forgot about those at the entry level and began to see their positions as not those of helping another up the ladder but a position to say and do all that they could to get higher on that ladder.  This style of selfishness became the norm and was even celebrated by that infamous saying of a Michael Douglas character when he said that “greed was good”. 

As the love of money began to make its ever snail-like creep into the American psyche, business began to seek the same.  It became more about making money than it did about providing a quality product at a quality price.  Many businesses went from investing in R&D and concentrating on acquisitions as a way of availing themselves to more customers and increasing their bottom line.  Innovation and creativity began it way as the dinosaurs and those with business degrees in the “greed is good” category of our education system took control.  Classic example of this is a Parsippany, New Jersey Company called Securitas Security Services USA, Inc.  (Securitas).  Securitas boasts of its “450 local branch offices and approximately 100,000 employees, with clients from nearly every segment of the security industry” but it was not due to making the industry better or providing better customer relations or a better product.  It was simply through acquisitions.  “Securitas entered the U.S. market in 1999 with the acquisition of Pinkerton’s Inc. and by 2001 acquired several more guarding companies including Burns International”.

We lost our spark and our shining city on the hill began to darken as we ran from what made us the nation we were before.  Now to be able to get a new or improved item on the market, obstacles are so great that many wanta-be innovators see no clear path to success and table all desire to make things better.  We see no avenue to restoring that basic desire of all which is a quality product at an affordable price so we swallow our creativity and succumb to a dismal society.  The drive to do it better is lost in the business community and replaced by a new definition of business which is profit over people.   We don’t make anything anymore.  We just wait until someone else does then buy them out because it is widely believed that “everyone has a price”.