I fear renting from the chariotmongers. It seems that whenever I return a rental car, these sods have conjured up some new billing rort.
But this time the Duchess and I were home free. The Wellington rental depot waved us through and charged not a cent extra - not even for picking up the Lindauer empty left rattling round the boot.
But then came the morning email, and the thud of economic reality. They hadn't been dozing. They'd imposed an extra fee for topping up the petrol tank.
This was, er, ‘‘surprising''. Moments before returning their Ford Focus, I'd filled its tank to the brim at a station all of 50m from their front gate.
Email hostilities commenced. But I'd begun from a losing position - they'd already used my credit card to trouser the extras. Eventually I gave up. I hadn't kept the wretched receipt, the sum was less than $20, and it wasn't worth more time and anger.
Last month, Hertz (a different firm) was shamed when Australian consumer cops discovered they had charged 280 punters for panelbeating out naughty new dings that were actually pre-existing. What's more, they'd overbilled a further 700 renters who'd incurred proper repairs.
These are in-your-face scams you might expect from the small-timers crucified each week by the Fair Go reporters. But not Hertz. It's a $5 billion company which feeds 30,000 staff, and started off renting Model Ts a century ago. It qualifies as a business institution.
Big business was once well trusted by its customers. A generation ago, we believed that if companies were big, it followed they must be honest. Our Anglo society had faith in the integrity of its blueblood institutions - and ‘‘institutions'' included our largest businesses, not just government, the law and the church.
Well that was back then. Today, you trust your mechanic, your electrician, and your fish shop more than a big firm like your bank, insurer, telco or electricity company. We know from experience that many of the big boys in services and utilities have perfected the science of skinning we customers with murky price plans, hidden fees, invented penalties and fine print.
What they've actually ‘‘institutionalised'' is an everyday culture of carping, fine-tuned cheating. And it's almost childishly blatant.
Why has this become our doleful new reality? Well, look back to when we embraced a new religion called the Church of Economic Rationalism (I believe a Labour priest, the Rev Roger Douglas, founded its Kiwi congregation).
This is a tub-thumping fundamentalist faith that believes in the free market and the purity of a commerce set freefrom its bonds. It would bulldoze silly rules that got in the way of trade, privatise slovenly government businesses and outsource work to wherever the slave trade could do it cheaper (Made in China, Serviced in India, Paid in New Zealand).
Actually, much of it has worked brilliantly. We should remember this next time we pay 20 bucks for necessities like the Chinese noodle machine, or the Indonesian bicycling regalia.
But ‘‘economic rationalism'' has invented chiselling greed as its byproduct. Our big companies have become slaves to the performance metrics of the share markets. They are run by suited princes whose goldmine packages pay them for the market's opinion, rather than the customers' regard.
And their practices are dictated by the most influential science of the age - the science taught by the Business Schools. It's sharp and manipulative, but if this science was asked to define ‘‘business morality'', it would scratch its head, take pen to white board and write up Key Performance Indicators.
The problem of Economic Rationalism is it no longer seems rational. We began to see this more clearly when the 2007 Global Financial Crisis showed what we thought were warts were actually cancers.
We hold cheats in contempt, yet still the cheating of many of our leading corporates becomes more blatant.
The nightmare big business fears today is a return to the straitjacket rules of the Left. Unfortunately they're inviting it - by the tankful.
- John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
