the customer is always right

Watching Obama's health care address on the Internet last night (admittedly a few days late), I was struck, though not surprised, that the following remark drew some of the largest applause from both sides of the aisle:

My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition. That's how the market works.

Nothing proves your American bona fides like extolling the virtues of the free market, even if you're a liberal Democrat trying to reform our health care system. I rolled my eyes a bit while listening to that, feeling slightly left out of the general enthusiasm for market-based competition.

And then I did the laundry.

Having been away from Britain for a number of years, I'd forgotten certain things, such as the fact that nearly all the clothes dryers I've encountered here don't fully dry the clothes. They come out almost dry, but still distinctly damp. I'm not talking about one particular clothes dryer but rather Every. Single. One.

This situation seems to be widely accepted by English people, nearly all of whom seem to own a steel-frame drying rack upon which they hang these slightly damp clothes after they come out of the dryer, so that they can fully dry.

As an American, my natural response is to ask, "What's the point of a machine that only does part of the job that it's supposedly designed to do??" Why use an electric dryer at all, if you're just going to hang the clothes out (in the middle of the living room) to let nature finish the job? The charitable explanation is an environmentally conscientious one: weak dryers use less energy. So, in the interest of saving the earth, we invent crappy machines?

In New York, I and the people I know are given to casual remarks about how great everything is in Europe, with their single-payer health care and their fuel efficient cars, trying to distance ourselves from a certain strain of particularly "Ugly Americanism." Over here, though, I find myself again and again wanting to sound that very note, complaining about bad customer service, about shops that aren't open all night, about bad engineering.

Why does the toilet always need to flushed twice?

And, while we're at it, why are the toilet and the shower in SEPARATE ROOMS??

Most visitors to the UK will confirm that the problems I've identified are prevalent across the nation, in a majority of habitations and a majority of cities and towns. Does it have something to do with everything getting destroyed in the Blitz? War time rationing? Whatever the cause, it seems that your average Briton does not have this ingrained mania for customer satisfaction. He or she is more than likely to just put up with a less than ideal situation and make do.

Growing up in a land of air conditioning and free refills, even the most liberal among us have developed an attitude that we should be able to get what we want when we want it. Our way right away.

Obama's analysis of the American character is feeling pretty spot-on.