SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I suppose this question could pertain to infidelity as well but it’s not why I’m posting.

I recently terminated a relationship with a company that I’ve been with for over 3 decades. When I called to do so, I merely got an ok it will be taken care of within 48 hours. No fuss, no muss right?

I suppose on one hand, I should be grateful that it was so easy and not miles of red tape and numerous hoops to jump through. One phone call and an email was all it took.

On the other hand, you would kinda hope they would have at least asked why I was leaving. Made at least a token effort to keep my business. Nope. It’s see ya later, adios.

Sigh, I suppose it’s just a sign of the times.

It seems loyalty isn’t valued.
I have been using the same bank for over 20 years. Same institution gave us our mortgage, manages a fair share of our savings and basically is the go-to place for financial transactions. Recently I realized that my son got better rates on nearly all services simply because he was a new customer. When I phoned my contact at the bank he told me that yes, in order to get new customers they did offer them better interest, lower charges and so on… It’s not a big amount, it’s maybe a difference for me of 50-100 over a year, but I think it strange that someone with no track-record is seen as a more valuable asset than someone with no defaults in over 20 years. Like I told my contact: maybe I need to become a new customer at some other bank…

I work for a small business with a good reputation that has been around for decades. As the bosses have gotten older (close to/older than retirement ages), they remind me more and more of the Soup Guy from Seinfeld.

A longtime customer complained (rather rudely) recently about something not in our control. Bosses reimbursed them for their last bill. The customer tried to come back for another job, and bosses basically responded and said, no, we think you made it pretty clear we're not what you're looking for.

I don't know if it has so much to do with loyalty, and more like... life is too short to deal with customers or vendors that (for whatever reason) are unhappy or don't want to work with you, whatever their reasons may be.

Did you at least get a going away party? 30 years is a long time.

I was an IT guy. In the '80s, companies almost always paid more for new hires than they paid their current employees. Even in civil service-type jobs, you could jump from one agency to another for a big raise, but if you stayed in your own agency, your salary advanced according to the schedule. It was truly stupid management.

Not doing an exit interview is also stupid management, especially now that it's hard to hire people. They missed an opportunity to find out if they could do better at retaining staff. OTOH, your company could be so short-staffed that management truly couldn't do an exit interview, and they might be telling themself they did pretty well retaining you.

OTOH, my hat is off to your bosses, ibonnie. There are other ways to have handled the former customer, but firing him was one decent option, IMO. I probably would have opted for a chat, though.

Did you at least get a going away party? 30 years is a long time.

I got the impression this wasn't job related. She had given a company her business for 30 years, then left, and they did nothing to try to retain her business with them

I'd been with the same major auto/home insurance company for 45+ years when we moved to CA. They wouldn't write us a homeowner's insurance policy because we live near a high-brush area (we are literally one block from the cut-off). But because we weren't getting our homeowner's policy from them, we then didn't qualify for the multi-policy discount for auto, so we left them. And of course, even if we had continued our auto insurance with them, the new company writing our homeowner's policy wouldn't give us a multi-policy discount if we didn't carry our auto insurance with them. It sucked.

About once a month, on NextDoor, someone posts about being cut off from their homeowner's policy, and needs a recommendation for a new company. But yea, we were with this company since I started driving at 16, and never had a claim that was deemed our fault. Never.

I was with the company I worked for for almost 20 years total (about a year as a temp and almost 19 as a full time employee). I had the most all around experience of any employee, including management, among three facilities. Put me anywhere on the production floor and I could do the job with little to no training. I got a work related injury, had surgery to correct it (it's not 100% but it gave me range of motion back, which is what I needed) and I was put in a position that would only exacerbate it if I stayed there. Management didn't care. In fact they reinstated an old policy *just for me* that said no working if you have restrictions. They were accomodating another employee that had a worse injury than mine. Twenty years and it was too much trouble to accomodate my injury so it wouldn't worsen. So to answer the question, no, loyalty isn't valued anymore - at least from my experience.

Another thought - it was never valued all that much anyway. I'm a Rhode Islander. People got Shanghaied from Providence (and Newport and Salem and Boston and from other Southern New England ports, but Providence was a center of Shanghai-ing.)

RI was also the hub of the industrial revolution in the US. The 1st textile plant outside of England was in Pawtucket. The Pawtucket and Central Falls textile mill owners reportedly passed laws prohibiting citizens from owning clocks, so they could start work early and end it late. A Church with a clock was built close to the Slater mill to show the time to workers.

Workers who got injured in plants often just lost their jobs, even when the injury came from unsafe practices instituted by management, usually owners.

Slavery in the Caribbean and colonies that became states was legal and common where it was profitable.

Our (human beings) inhumanity to fellow human beings seems to be unstoppable.