I am not going back

I have purchased three cars through Carvana. I am not going back to a dealership to be sold the next one. I choose what I want to watch through streaming services, accept that the collection can get expensive, and I am not going back to cable either.

The decision is made. Another explanation of why I should prefer the old experience is going to arrive several purchases too late.

The old model is not waiting patiently for me to return. It is competing with the freedom I would have to surrender.

The habit that broke was yours

Businesses sometimes describe a changing customer as disloyal. That assumes loyalty meant continuing to tolerate the same process after a better-fitting option became available.

I do not owe a buying ritual my continued participation because it once occupied the market. If I can research, compare and purchase without an intermediary paid to close me, I will consider that an advantage.

And if obtaining that control costs a little more, I can decide that it is worth the difference. An informed choice is not invalid because the seller dislikes the values used to make it.

I already know the alternatives have flaws

I can dislike a price increase and still refuse cable. I can have reservations about a platform and still prefer buying without a closer. A preference is not a lifetime oath of allegiance. It can be conditional, annoyed and entirely rational at the same time.

The old model loves pointing at imperfections in the alternative as though I must therefore miss the old model. I do not. A problem with the new apartment does not make me nostalgic for the landlord who kept entering without knocking.

That is the gap the industry keeps talking past. It wants to compare its best imagined version with every actual defect in the replacement. I am comparing the experience I left with the control I have now.

There is no obligation to preserve the arrangement

After twenty years around marketing and business, I am tired of the assumption that keeping an existing company comfortable is automatically a worthwhile objective. Demand changes. Access changes. People find another way to get what they need. Some business models will have to change or lose the customer.

That is a consequence, not an injustice inflicted by insufficiently loyal buyers.

The response cannot forever be another campaign explaining why we should enjoy something we have already rejected. We heard the explanation. We participated for years. We left with plenty of information.

I am not returning because somebody misses the margin, the control or the opportunity to work me through a process. The people who built their lives around that arrangement can be angry about losing it. They do not get to make their anger my purchasing obligation.

I have things to do. Preserving a stranger’s preferred way of selling to me is not one of them.