A survey was published today in the UK showing that the amount of tea sold has been going down for the last few years. The reason put forward by the trade organization ,The Tea Council , was that this was due to global warming . Also the other day Winnebago blamed the downturn of sales of their products to the war in Iraq (!!). What other lame excuses have dopers come across when companies and organizations are looking for a reason for a fall-off in sales ?.
Piracy?
Not exactly relevant but it seems like a good place to put it in.
I was broke and arguing with my bank for the 100 quid that they had stolen from me.
Bank guy: “I empathize with your concerns, Ms Cowgirl, but you must understand we have to balance your needs against the needs of the bank.”
I laughed aloud. “You can’t be serious. Who do you think needs it more?” He backpedalled.
I got my 100 quid back.
Anything Microsoft says. 
When I told a guy last week at an expensive designer furniture store that their prices were pretty high for stuff made of veneered plywood rather than solid wood, he explained it was because veneer was ‘smoother’.
Way back years ago, my dad answered the door to find a door-to-door salesman who was selling a “World’s Greatest Books” thingy, where they send you a classic book every month for some low low price. My dad was actually kind of interested in this, or at least interested enough that he wanted to hear the details. But at one point during his pitch, the kid said that they were actually selling the books for less than their cost. Now, keep in mind that my dad has an MBA from Harvard. So he asked the kid if that were the case, then how did they make money with their business? His answer? “We make it up in volume.”
The salesman must have been a Laurel & Hardy fan.*
Stan: “We need a bigger truck!”
*They were buying fish for $1/pound and selling fish for $1/pound, or something like that, and couldn’t figure out why they weren’t making money, until Stan came up with his brainstorm.
In the paper the other day, they had a quote from a cable company exec concerning their losses of customers to satellite TV. It’s only temporary, they’ll soon come back to us. Yeah, right. And monkeys …
In the industry I work in, one of the main products can be built one of two ways - either a version that locks itself into place, or one that you have to manually lock. Up until a couple years ago, the company I work for had a patent on the self-locking version. Because they couldn’t make it our way, all their training and marketing materials emphasized how the manual lock made the product more stable and durable. Of course, 6 months after our patent expired they launched their own self-locking product.
Does anyone else like Crazy Bread from Little Ceasers? I do, it’s the only thing they sell that I can eat. For the past several weeks (nearly 2 months, I believe) there has been a little sign appologizing to customers for not having it since there is “distibution shortage” from their vendor. So which do you think they ran out of, dough or garlic?
God I wish I knew exactly how they made it…
This morning, I heard on the radio that Kodak was blaming a drop in film sales to…
wait for it…
the SARS virus! Apparently, less people are traveling to Asia now, and less travel means less pictures taken.
I’ve never used this recipe, and it’s been years since I had Crazy Bread, so I can’t attest to how close it is, but here is a copy cat recipe for crazy bread & sauce:
When I was in high school, I worked for a chain family-style restaurant. One popular item on the buffet was fried chicken wings, and at one point we ran out and didn’t get any new stock in for a few weeks. The reason our manager gave us was that the supplier was out of stock because the chickens weren’t big enough to kill yet. So when customers didn’t accept the “the supplier is out of stock” and then “no they don’t know when we’ll get more” reasons, I would tell them “their chickens aren’t big enough to kill yet.”
I had an argument with BT (British Telecom) over a phone line I had put into my humble student abode in order to get internet access. The quality on the line was so poor that the modem couldn’t dial up (we weren’t in an area where broadband was available). When I contacted them and complained, their response was that they are only required by law to provide “lines suitable for voice communication”. I wonder if at some point they might like to step into the late 20th century?
The house I used to live in was a brand new house - I was the first owner. Imagine my surprise when not a year after I moved in the roof started to leak. The home was under warrantee, so the builder came out and did something to stop the leak. Turns out it was a temporary fix, since the next spring the same thing happened. At that point, the house was out of warrantee, but I called the builder anyway with the idea that a 2 year old roof should NOT leak.
They came out and looked at it. They called me later and refused to fix it. I bitched, saying “C’mon, it’s TWO YEARS OLD. Roofs are supposed to last 10 or 20 years!”
Their response?
“Roofs just leak sometimes.”