State Farm turns over a new leaf

Maybe it was visited by three ghosts on the night of August 10, 2017?

I mean, there has to be some reason why the State Farm Insurance Company, which was founded in 1922, waited ninety-five years before suddenly deciding that "starting today," it was going to work with Americans who are facing financial difficulties, publishing that declaration on YouTube on August 11, 2017.

What was so special about that day?  Why not the previous week? Not enough Americans having a hard time making ends meet then?  For that matter, why not during the Great Depression?  Seems like State Farm would have had no problem finding a whole lot of people having a tough time making ends meet back then, too. 

Maybe I shouldn't be too hard on State Farm.  The company has a total net value of a quarter of a trillion dollars and an annual revenue stream of about $87 billion. I have quite a bit less than that and I have a hard time deciding exactly how and where to spend my money- it must be at least TWICE as hard for a gigantic insurance company to make decisions like that.  Still, did it really have to take ninety-five years for State Farm to wake up one day and decide "hey, you know what we should do?  Help people make good financial decisions and secure their futures for retirement and college and stuff."

Maybe this is just something corporate behemoths do when they've spent nearly a century becoming obscenely rich by taking premiums and not paying off policies except when absolutely required to by law and with as much foot-shuffling and delaying as humanly possible.  I don't know- again, I don't have a lot of experience handling quite as much money as State Farm deals with regularly. 

Maybe State Farm noticed that Steve Jobs behaved like a disgustingly, insanely greedy pig-human hybrid who insisted on moving his manufacturing base to Asia so he could build a personal fortune of $10 billion instead of the $5 billion he might have had by staying in North America and paying the people who put together his electronic toys a living wage....and then died of cancer at the age of 56 anyway.  Kind of a nice reminder that there just might be more to existence than watching your vault of money burst at the seams. 

Or maybe this is just a bit of cloying soft-sell from another "Company that Cares."  If that's the case, I'd still like to know why, when I was hit by a drunk driver fifteen years ago, State Farm couldn't give me my $500 deductible back because it was unable to extract it from the drunk who had no assets.  Oh right, I forgot.  That was before August 11, 2017.  They weren't in to giving a damn back then.