A Stitch in Haste

OpinionJournal has a fluff piece profiling the online matchmaking service eHarmony:

[CEO Greg Waldorf] now estimates revenue to approach $200 million for 2007, with business to be "gangbusters" through Valentine's Day. The company boasts 14 million registrants since its founding. Perhaps most important, at a time when there seems to be great cynicism about marriage, Mr. Waldorf is confident that Americans still place a high premium on lasting commitment. Just look at the economics.

"I'm very respectful of people who pull out their credit card to pay for our service," he says. "I think they're getting a good opportunity to meet the right person, but this is real money. This could be the same cost as your cellphone plan, and I'm not trying to equate cellphone plans with finding a soulmate, but it's real money to people." Why are they willing to pay so much? Because "people associate the highest value with long-term relationships."

Perhaps I'm a victim of pre-dot-com thinking, but I'm guessing that $200 million is a very aggressive estimate [the article does not provide historical results]. eHarmony is a distant fourth in the online personals market.

In any case, I think it's fascinating that a company can claim to be so "respecting" of its customer base while in fact being one of the most bigoted companies in cyberspace:

[Founder Neil Clark Warren] really does want to set you up — but only if you're emotionally healthy, heterosexual and want to get married.

A psychologist with a divinity degree, Warren has emerged from the Christian community — three of his 10 books on love and dating were published by conservative Focus on the Family — to become one of the Internet's most unlikely entrepreneurs.
...
The connection may come as a surprise to today's mainstream users: Nothing in Warren's TV or radio ads ($50 million spent last year, $80 million projected this year) hints at his Christian background.

And while it's no secret, the Web site doesn't play it up, either.

This constitutes "respecting your customers"?

Of course, private businesses do (or at least should) have the right to discriminate as they see fit. It is, after all, a "free" market.

But don't trumpet a firm that so flagrantly discriminates as a capitalist "success story." True capitalists, pure capitalists, don't base, or even constrain, their business practices based on bigotry. True capitalists, pure capitalists, are too busy making money to be distracted by archaic bigotry. True capitalists, pure capitalists, have ideals that are too far "beneath" the lofty aspirations of "enlightened Christians" like Neil Clark Warren. True capitalists, pure capitalists, are the legitimate "reality-based community," and as such are focused on life on this earth and not on trying to earn (buy?) their way into heaven.

Bottom-line: eHarmony may be an interesting case study, but precisely because it is not true capitalism, not pure capitalism.