Some companies seem a bit suicidal

I have noticed a trend lately. Many of the companies I deal with seem to be deliberately trying to annoy their customers. In these difficult economic times I really don't understand this.

I used to do most of my shopping at Meijer. Then they started reducing the number of cashiers so that long lines would form at the register. That was followed by replacing most of the cashiers with self-checkout lanes. While some people like them I hate self-checkout lanes, and so do quite a few others judging by the long lines of people waiting to check out at the few lanes that still have cashiers. The result is that while I used to spend over $100 a week at Meijer I now spend less than $20, and would stop spending that much if I could find another brand of chocolate milk my son likes.

I used to shop at Home Depot a lot, but now you have to walk through a gauntlet of no less than four people trying to sell you roof repairs, some special product, a credit card, or something similar. Now I do most of my shopping at Lowes.

I rarely sign up for email of special offers from companies, but for a few of my favorites I have. Of these I have had to drop out of two thirds of them because they started sending me daily emails. Do they really think they can harass me into buying something?

I realize all of these are attempts to save money and increase sales, but you don't accomplish those things by driving away your customers. The people that run these companies surely must know that, they are customers themselves. Yet the companies do it anyway. Either you can truly harass your customers into buying more or these companies have become so desperate they are suicidal. I am not a retail genius but I am leaning towards the second explanation.

Symmetry

I haven't posted in a long time, I was working a lot of hours on a project at work. But now I am starting to recover so time to post something.

A while ago I told somebody that a particular situation offended my sense of symmetry. It started me thinking and I realized that a lot of the way I think has to do with symmetry. My concept of fairness reflects symmetry in that I believe each side of a deal should be equal. My database designs usually reflect symmetry in the way I design the relationships between tables.

Sometimes however you don't have symmetry. A tree growing naturally is rarely symmetrical, yet it is not any less beautiful. In real life you can't always have symmetry, and certain situations it would be bad if you did (parents should punish a child but a child should not be able to punish his parents).

My need for symmetry puts me at odds with the real world where you can't always get symmetry and sometimes don't want it. Yet my sense of symmetry has served me well in my work and some of my real life dealings.

In a practical sense my need for symmetry is both good and bad. It has allowed me to create great database designs yet has caused me serious frustration in dealing with the real world. How do you deal with this?