The other day my mind traveled back to some time ago when a close family member and I did a road trip, by flying to a US city in the western part of the country and renting a car to journey on to San Francisco.
As we were waiting our turn at the long line-up (ridiculously long) to register and pickup our car, I saw the long list of little ‘service add-ons’ the company cared to advertize: 3 different ways of gas-refill at return, additional insurances that went from ‘only’ $10/day to $20/day, and a wonderfully long list of little additional services that are supposed to make our lives (the consumers’ lives) simpler and more ‘cost’ effective!
As I was contemplating these wonderful offerings, I remembered that over 70% of the US GDP is produced by services and the nation has been proud of its service sector performance, which includes all the digital and virtual world services. Indeed, an achievement! Can you imagine, over 70% of UA’s economy does not produce anything tangible! And that has been the case for decades.
Afterwards, when we went over to pickup the car, I realized that over ¾ of the cars they had on offer were European or Asian (Japan, Korea) cars. There were some North American (US) cars, like the one we drove away in, but mostly these rental agencies have foreign cars to rent. And you have to assume there is a rational reason for this, such as popularity, quality, cost effectiveness.
As I was reflecting on these ideas, I thought of Donald Trump’s claim of desindustrialization of the USA at the hands of ‘foreign countries,’ and thus his tariffs. I wondered, if the real cause of deindustrialization is not in fact a certain complacency of the entire business ecco-system’s ethos towards ‘easy quick-win, quick-bucks’ service add-ons and outsourcing, which has left car rental agencies provide all sorts of services on the back of imported cars, because their own clients are not very much interested in American cars.
Paris, August 21, 2025
Zeejay