One day in late January 2024, while checking the news on the ABC website, I stumbled across an article about a small business that had been alerted by “a lost and confused customer” that Apple maps had listed their business as “temporarily closed” and was not displaying the laneway on which they were located.
Thistleberry Farm is a blueberry farm located about 15 minutes’ drive outside of the regional Australian city of Ballarat. Apart from filling orders, it also allows (wants) customers to drive out to the farm to pick their own berries. Being in a rural location means that their location and opening hours are important information that need to be shared with customers. Apple arbitrarily leaving this off their maps was problematic. Here is what co-owner Laura Ridout had to say in the article:
"’Honestly, it felt crushing,’ she said. ‘We're a really small business and this is all new to us. It's scary enough as it is without having a giant corporation that I'm not even a user of wipe us off the map.’”
In this article there was a link to another - Apple Maps wrongly lists restaurant 'permanently closed' which owner says has cost him thousands. This article contained virtually the same themes: a small business (a restaurant called Pum’s Kitchen) is alerted by confused customers that they are listed as closed (permanently, this time) by Apple maps and this costs them customers and revenue:
“‘We have no idea when this change went through,’ (co-owner) Mr Pyatt said. ‘We've noted a significant downturn, of around $12,000. This is our livelihood.’"
What I like about the reporting in these articles is that they both highlight how devastating this Apple maps bug is to these small business owner-operators, not just in terms of marketing and loss of revenue but also emotionally.
"’It's just bloody ridiculous. I feel helpless like I've been taken hostage,’ (Laura Ridout from Thistleberry Farm) said. ‘I'm angry at the fact that some massive corporation has the right to essentially wipe me off the map like I don't matter. Small business matters, especially in rural Australia, and to have some bloody US Corporation come in here and just take me off the map like I don't exist, and then just run me around in circles.’”
"’It's not right to close any online presence,’ (Chris Pyatt from Pum’s Kitchen) said. ‘If you have a particular company which is precluding you from being able to access information about yourself, or your business, that's quite a scary situation to me.’”
Last year when I had my run-ins with Microsoft, Telstra, Lulu, PayPal, and Amazon, I kept coming up against the phrase ‘inconvenience’. “We’re sorry for any inconvenience,” the idiot Chatbots or unfortunate minimum wage social media staff would tell me. And I really grew to hate that word ‘inconvenient’ because I was not inconvenienced; I was derailed, devastated, undermined by the problems I was encountering.
“… wipe me off the map… just take me off the map like I don’t exist…”
“… that’s quite a scary situation to me.”
The owners of Thistleberry Farm and Pum’s Kitchen aren’t talking about being inconvenienced either. They are talking about feeling “angry”, being “taken hostage”, being wiped “off the map” (literally) and being in a “scary situation.”
The journalists of these articles and their subjects make it quite clear that Apple’s little technical hitch is threatening livelihoods. And – another thing I was pleased to see highlighted – was just how hard it was to get the problem fixed.
In the article about Pum’s Kitchen, there is a subheading ‘Virtual Run-Around’ and both articles highlight just how difficult, time-consuming, and stressful it was to attempt to have the right information installed:
“Ms Ridout said she had spent multiple days trying to rectify the issue with different Apple technicians and had uploaded multiple documents — only to have her requests rejected. She said there had been days where the stress and frustration had driven her to tears. ‘My husband's been left alone to manage the farm on his own, and that's a lot, and a lot of stress,’ she said.”
And in the case of Pum’s Kitchen, neither of the owners “… own an Apple product, which made fixing the error a challenge.”
Given the number of people who use Apple products, it’s not an option for these small business owners to just ignore this problem. They have to get it fixed. But, as with my own experience and, according to the articles, the experience of many other small business owners, accessing good customer service and getting a timely response from corporations like Apple can feel impossible.
Interestingly, I read recently that the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman nominated “trouble with a digital service provider” as one of the top four issues besetting small businesses in Australia, with one quarter of the issues lodged with the Ombudsman involving a digital platform.
“Digital platforms have fundamentally changed the way in which small and micro businesses connect and sell to their customers yet when there is a problem – such as having your account shut down after being hacked – solving it can be a nightmare*. Often there is no real person you can speak to, and the automated systems prevent you being able to escalate the issue. One of the absurdities is after being locked out of your account, you need to access your account to make a complaint. It’s the ultimate run around.” – Bruce Billson, Ombudsman
All of this mucking about with poor customer service and communications and poorly designed processes costs small businesses and sole traders time and energy that they can ill-afford.
“Ms Ridout said she wouldn't consider the matter finished until she had the ability to control her hours on the app to show customers when the farm gate was open. ‘You need to show that you're a serious business, that you are available when you say you are, especially when you're in a rural location,’ she said.”
This quote speaks to a couple of things. The first is having a sense of agency, of feeling empowered to run your business in the way you see fit. The second is the issue of branding and reputation – showing that you’re professional, reliable, well-operated, “a serious business” as Ms Ridout puts it.
Interestingly, Ms Ridout says “I feel helpless like I've been taken hostage” as quoted above. This speaks to a feeling of having your agency diminished, and this is a cruel experience for anyone who has worked their butt off to build their own enterprise. This sense that, as Ms Ridout says above, some huge corporation can just crush all of your painstaking efforts because of some technical bug is galling. When that sloppy corporation is one as big and oft used by your potential customers as Apple makes it even worse: You can’t avoid the corporation, and its technical gremlins, and its crappy customer service, and the fact that it just doesn’t seem to care about getting things right.
On the morning that I read these two articles and empathised with these small businesspeople taking on a tech corporation, I read an article about Dostoevsky’s gambling habit. (This is going to seem like a digression but it’s not).
I didn’t know that the famous Russian author had a gambling habit, but he did, losing money at Roulette for a number of years before shaking his habit:
“Dostoevsky soon fell into a pattern of chasing his losses, telling himself that his fortunes would change, and he would redeem himself: ‘…one turn of the wheel, and all will be changed, and those very moralists will be the first (I am convinced of that) to come up to congratulate me with friendly jests. And they will not all turn away from me as they do now. But, hang them all! What am I now? Zero. What may I be tomorrow? Tomorrow I may rise from the dead and begin to live again! There are still the makings of a man in me.’”
Now, I have never had a gambling habit; I don’t even find gambling to be mildly interesting. Nor do I have any other addictions or obsessions. So I was surprised to find myself feeling slightly anxious while I was reading How Dostoevsky overcame his gambling addiction. And even more surprised when I realised that my anxiety came from an errant sense of self-recognition in Dostoevsky’s words: “Tomorrow I may rise from the dead and begin to live again! There are still the makings of a man in me.”
Or woman, in my case.
I recognised a feeling of continually chasing my losses that arose last year. After each tech disaster with Microsoft or Amazon or PayPal, after each failed experiment to captivate the social media algorithms so that I could market myself at scale, I kept telling myself that things would get better, that tomorrow was another day, that I would find a way of fixing these technical problems, that I would reclaim my time and energy and optimism, that “Tomorrow I may rise from the dead and begin to live again!”
After I understood where this little feeling of anxiety came from, I was able to take myself to task: Building my professional practice was not like playing roulette. It was based on research, planning, paying attention to detail, and careful effort.
That idea of agency resurfaced. Yes, there are things in the world that are not in my control and some of these would affect my work as a sole trader. But I had the agency to decide how to respond to these: What to learn, research, adapt, relinquish, or develop.
But then I remembered the two articles about Thistleberry Farm and Pum’s Kitchen, about how hard their owners worked, and about how a corporation’s bad technology and bad customer service jeapordised that hard work. And I realised that in this world where we and our customers are sort of held hostage by tech companies how little my sense of agency would mean if something went wrong with that technology.
And I realised that I am that gambler; gambling that my hard work will prevail, that the next technical problem won’t be soon or too bad. Because if it is, then I’m out of luck.
*In my recent article about algorithmic precarity, I referred to a paper called Attached the Algorithm. It contained this quote, which I think also touches on this “nightmare” and lack of agency: “Users describe a sense of helplessness following algorithmic punishment. While Instagram does have a Help Center, many users note that appeals and reports are never resolved, and that it is impossible to actually speak to someone about their case.”
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