All Companies Sell Solutions Now And It's Weird

I write about companies and business now. I know, right? – weird. How has that happened? Not only do I not know anything about business whatsoever (I mean, I’ve done some brushing up since, but when I started: no), I also try and nurture a healthy scepticism of capitalist enterprise.

So with capitalism having kicked up a notch since 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis [citation needed], it’s interesting to see how companies are working hard to efface their identities as overtly capitalist makers and buyers and sellers of things, in favour of something approaching charity.

All companies solve problems now. The things they sell are no longer products but “solutions”. We’re here to help people, and make your life easier, they say, lots of eye contact, hand on knee. And if we make some money from it at the same time well that’s rather nice. Why tho? Is it supposed to distract from all the shady activities companies conduct? Is it a guilt thing? Is it just a corporate fad?

The approach, creepy as it is, works without sounding too weird for companies in the service industry for instance, but when companies in other industries that sell literal physical things bend over backwards to position their wares as solutions, it becomes strange and hilarious.

Over the past few months I’ve curated a collection of the best examples and put them in a quiz format. I’ve removed all the company names, and for each, try and work out what they actually do from the description.

1. [This company] assists industries in finding and implementing ever more responsible and value-creating solutions. Our products serve diversified markets, from consumer goods to energy, with one main aim – to improve quality of life and customer performance.
2. We are the ones who help your application landscapes become flexible and productive. We take responsibility for the entire lifecycle of your applications from development to maintenance, while working with you to simplify your landscape.
3. Inventing, designing and producing high quality solutions for customers and patients, [company] offers products that are designed with patients’ needs in mind.
4. [Company] is a globally diversified natural resources company with low cost operations. We empower our people to drive excellence and innovation to create value for our stakeholders. We demonstrate world-class standards of governance, safety, sustainability, and social responsibility. At [Company], our people are our most important assets. We actively encourage their development and support them in pursuing their goals.
5. [This company] is a leading sleep solution destination.

Answers

1. This company is a fucking gigantic chemical group
2. Why does a massive IT group have such an obsession with landscape gardening?
3. This lot sell gases used in healthcare
4. A mining company
5. A bed company. This company sells beds. For fucksake.

Spurs, Arsenal and Suffering

Oh Arsenal fans, you amateurs. You thought the turbulent late-Wenger years had taught you to suffer – all those embarrassing losses to the Premier League’s tadpoles, Theo running, Theo stopping, Theo tackled, all those predictably brief Champions League runs, perennially failing your way to another fourth-place league finish to the soundtrack of Piers Morgan’s petulant wailing – God what misery it is to be an Arsenal fan, you thought. What purgatorial spite, what embers of hope so cruelly drenched, year after year.

You pathetic amateurs. You haven’t a clue.

On Sunday afternoon a crescendo of suffering – a shrieking, deceitful, Beckettian crescendo that for so long sounded like a waltz – peaked at St. James’ Park and came crashing down on the white half of North London. Our best team since the 1960s, a miraculous coming together of unlikely young Englishmen and rejuvenated foreign talents, smited on the Northern Rock. Sorry fellers, this century’s fairytale quota has already been spent, there’s nowt we can do.

We flew too high. A combined seven unanswered goals past Stoke and Manchester United in April gave us a real if outside chance of catching Leicester. A stumble from them and we could – as Harry Kane expressed on his Instagram with a picture of a pack of lions – pounce. But lions can’t fly (what a ridiculous notion, Harry) and in the rarefied air of a title chase West Brom equalized and Dele Alli’s little-shit schtick came home to roost: a three-game ban for a schoolboy swing, out for the season. Title hopes on life support. But still, a 5 point gap to Arsenal.

Then came Chelsea, a team of zombie champions whose only contribution to the season has been a massive weekly hit of schadenfreude for everyone else in England. Eden Hazard, the purest personification of Chelsea’s mighty under-performance with no goals and no visible effort expended by late April, publicly expressed his desire to see Leicester take the title. Any further points dropped would see the midlanders take the title, and deep within his small reptilian brain he saw the opportunity to make his mark. And so when Hazard joined the fray at halftime – and it indeed was a fray, a real re-telling of the Battle of Stamford Bridge worthy of the 1066 original – he set about an overheated, Alli-less Spurs team with the athleticism and clarity of purpose that won him a deserved Player of the Year last time out, bending a beautiful equalizer past Hugo Lloris.

Something broke that match in the minds of this young, so young, barely post-pubescent, Spurs team. Their calm deserted them, as did Mousa Dembélé, a pillar of strength throughout the season who joined Alli in the FA’s Monopoly-board prison for clawing crazily at Diego Costa’s face – do not pass go, do not pick up 3 points. Southampton, normally an easy fixture, sealed a 2-1 win at White Hart Lane through a Sean Davis brace, and with a draw at Manchester City, Arsenal closed the gap to one win. A draw at relegated Newcastle on the final day would be just enough to postpone St. Totteringham’s day, but wouldn’t it be funny, wouldn’t it be fucking hilarious, if Spurs were to lose that match?

Imagine if they lost, that even after being the prime victims of the Leicester City fairytale, in a year in which so the narrative goes they finally vanquished all their traditional rivals and scored the most goals, conceded the fewest and played the best football, but still came second – surely the epitome of Spursiness – that choice ability to find new and inventive ways to fail, the team’s only reliable quality – a prime cut of Spursiness – and then came third anyway? To Arsenal? On the last fucking day of the season? After shipping three goals in 20 minutes to 10-man relegated Newcastle when it looked like a comeback might be on? The sickness of mind needed to imagine such cruelty. The perversity.

At the end of the aforementioned Beckett’s tragicomic Waiting for Godot, one of the main characters tries to hang himself with his belt; he fails and his trousers fall down. Well string me up, you fucker, for it doesn’t get worse than this.