Dr. Sigrid Faltin - "Service? No, Servants! How We Customers Become Partial Employees"
How do we spend our leisure time? We assemble our furniture, we weigh our fruit and vegetables,we pack them together, we pay at the self-service cashier, we pick up our food from the self-service counter, we book our tickets via the internet, and pay the invoice online. We write reviews for Amazon and articles for Wikipedia for free, of course. We are craftspeople, bankers, package deliverers, waiters we are semi-employees. But the difference is - we work unpaid, never go onstrike, and don't take holidays. Meanwhile customers are working like this for many companies, who earn extra money with this system. Even consumer organizations tell us, If you have technical problems, press one. Some companies build their businesses by using this system. With "crowd-sourcing, companies use the creativity of internet users for their own purposes. Be it Nike, Adidas, Lego, or BMW they all have their new models designed by their customers. They are close to their client, who in return gets what he wants. So what is the problem? Those who aren't computer savvy will discover problems soon enough. They will have to pay either in time or in cash. What does the working customer mean for these companies, for the consumer, for society? For three weeks the director Sigrid Faltin tried to live with and buy only from automats and the internet. An entertaining foray through the brave new consumer world.
Dr. Sigrid Faltin,
studied English, German and History in Bonn and Freiburg. She did her Ph. D. thesus on "Emigration from the Palatinate, Germany, to North America in the 19th Century". After a short training period, she was Southwest Television's correspondent in Freiburg for several years. Since 1989 she has been working as a moderator, author and film director for public radio and television, for magazines and newspapers and, since 1995, as an independent producer. She produced a number of films with Peter Ohlendorf for Green Pepper Films (slogan: Films with Bite), mainly on ecological and Third World issues. Since 1998, White Pepper Films has concentrated on historical and cultural topics - even soccer is not taboo!
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