The Thrifty Rentacar Economy

            So we were in Chicago this weekend for the wedding of our son’s best friend.  We flew into O’Hare from Dulles on Frontier Airlines (don’t get me started . . .).

            After arriving at O’Hare, we left the terminal and walked to the ground transportation area.  We needed a shuttlebus to ferry us to the office where our Thrifty rentacar was waiting.  The shuttlebus wasn’t there, so we waited.

            The Hertz shuttle showed up several times.  So did the ones from Avis and Enterprise. 

            Forty-five minutes passed before the Thrifty shuttlebus finally arrived.  The driver mumbled something about the other driver having taken off for lunch early.

            Thrifty’s rental office wasn’t much different from other rentacar offices I’d been in.  Except that there was only 1 person trying to process about 10 customers.  Oh, and Joel Olsteen was preaching the gospel on HDTV.

            Eventually, another clerk showed up, just in time for the first clerk to go on break.  When she got to me, the new clerk wanted to sell me a prepaid pass for the Chicago area toll roads.  I asked her if my route required me to take toll roads for which I wouldn’t be able to pay with cash.  She didn’t know. She didn’t look it up either.

            She also warned me that if I brought the car back needing gas, they’d charge me $9.90 per gallon to top it off, unless I prepaid for the full tank of gas then and there. No refunds or credits for unused gas, though.  I guessed that gas was selling for about $3.00 per gallon in the area, and so I decided to take my chances.

            She directed me to a silver Nissan Sentra parked in a stall on the lot.  It used to be that a rentacar company would bring the car around for you to inspect before you left the lot.  Not today.  Fortunately, there weren’t any dings or dents.  But as we found out later, the car made a grinding noise when accelerating from zero, and the brakes squeaked while idling at traffic lights.

            All of this struck me as either corporate indifference or contempt. OK, these are discount operations, and I suppose you get what you pay for.  But still, I’d have thought that the baseline for customer service, even at discount shops, would have been better than that.

            What explains Thrifty’s low level of customer concern.  Well, perhaps this.

I got this graph from a July 31, 2015 in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog. The graph shows that no matter how you measure it, the amount of money employers spent on employees didn’t change much during the last year.  Companies just aren’t spending money on employees.

            That’s not a good thing, particularly when the stock market is through the roof and the official unemployment rate is in the basement.  It's still a buyer’s market for workers.  The graph tells us that there must be a lot of people out there who want to work or want to work more but can’t find employment causing some slack in the labor market.  If it were otherwise, we’d expect employee cost or wages to go up as employers compete to attract workers who have some choice about where they work.

            Most of the things I’ve been complaining about could have could have been addressed had Thrifty simply had more workers on duty.  There’s no excuse for not having multiple drivers to shuttle the 10 minutes between the lot and the terminal continuously.  Nor for workers shamed by the substandard customer care apocryphally delivered by workers in DMV offices. Nor for cars not routinely checked for worrisome noises.  Nor for having workers who are either unable or unwilling to help a customer make an intelligent purchase.  Nor for using a televangelist to entertain people he’s not likely to entertain.

            And yet, that’s where we are.  The baseline has been lowered.  Large companies like Thrifty can get away with providing this level of service because, they can depend on the idea that what they’re selling is a commodity where low prices win every time.   Most of us who rent from budget companies like these don’t travel enough to make a difference to them.  Thrifty can bank on the fact when its deals show up on our Kayak searches, few of us will know that Thrifty’s cut corners on customer service. Even if we do know and avoid companies like Thrifty, they know there’ll always be another sucker who won’t.

            Is Thrifty really so sure that there is, indeed, a market niche for people who truly want poor service?  Or is it merely being a rational player in a market rigged in its favor?  And have we simply become accustomed to what they give us in the Tragic Commons?