Is “The Road to Abilene” available on the net anywhere? I saw it about 10 years ago - I’d like to see it again
My former employer made a decision… well, it’s sort of linked to sales, but sort of not, in a way. It’s an interesting business case study.
I worked for a large management systems registration house; ISO 9001, 14001, TS, TL-9000, that sort of thing. For the longest time it was the largest in North America, by a fairly wide margin, and the largest in both the USA and Canada if you took them separately. The fact that we were the largest was a major part of our marketing.
Anyway, after a few changes and mergers, another company, BSI, caught up to us. Which company was bigger depended on what day of the week it was; it was a neck and neck race.
The company I worked for then became very concentrated on being the biggest, which we measured by the number of registrations out there. So if your little company was registered to ISO 9001, that’s one registration. However, if you want a lot of registrations, you want big, multi-site companies with many locations, since each is technically a separate registration, even if you’re doing a sampling plan.
The company, under executive direction, started concentrating on getting really big corporate accounts, and to get them, dropped prices to bargain basement levels, or offered them with travel costs not chargeable, stuff like that.
It finally reached the point where we were signing big contracts, BIG contracts, on which is was impossible for us to make a profit. In one particular case we inked a deal for about $1.1 million a year that cost us $1.3 million to service. We had offered to cover all travel costs and charge just $50 a day for travel; I had to do one audit that involved a five-hour drive, four nights’ stay in a hotel, plus meals and all that, and we charged only $200 for five days of travel and accomodations. Even being reasonably stingy, you can’t keep your daily costs for that sort of thing below $200 or so when you count driving costs. It was plainly insane; every job an auditor was asked to do, we lost hundreds of dollars.
It continued. A big client with many registrations was shopping around and in a moment of panic we gave them free service for a year. To retain a customer we were not making any money off anyway, we essentially handed them $100,000 worth of free service. And on and on.
Of course, what happened (surprise) was that the company started losing money. Our number of registrations was going up, but our revenue wasn’t keeping up, because we were giving our service away below cost just so we could say we were giving service to a lot of people. And we’d market our size, more big customers came along, and we’d offer them money-losing deals too, since of course word gets around about what you’re charging.
Realizing they were bleeding money, the company decided - I swear I’m not making this up - to just add $300 to everyone’s bill. No reason,m no added service; we were just goinhg to add $300 to everyone’s bill, to get some more money. It was itemized as “Service charge.” Now, if you’re the big customer paying $1.1 million, $300 is nothing; it’s unnoticeable. But for the 8,000 single site customers it was a huge bill. A small company might pay $1400 all in for a surveillance audit; jacking that to $1700 is a big shot.
So, you know what I’m going to say next, right? The small customers, who we WERE making money on, start to defect. The huge multi-sites, who’re getting registration for a song, don’t. So our margins get even worse.
I jumped ship last March. The entire outfit was sold to an Australian company last month; the original parent company just plain gave up and threw the white elephant into someone else’s zoo.
So, it’s a case of a company being obsessed with sales, but not sales in terms of the amount of money they were bringing in. **They made a decision based on the number of individual sales they made without regard to whether or not the sales made any money. ** And it cost a lot of people their jobs.
I don’t know. I just saw it for the first time a few weeks ago. It was a VHS tape, so… (my hospital is not known for it’s cutting edge tech in staff education!).
Was that before or after May (Yay Colorado stores) devoured Marshall Field’s
(I need to find an Article somewhere that gives the Departmeant store timeline, there was so much consumming going on I can never keep it straight)
I wonder how many people would got to a store called called: Macys Mays Daniels Fishers Hudsons Marshall Fields Foleys Filenes and Bloomingdales et all.
As long as you don’t count the Mac II (which had the best case-design of its era) and just about every other desktop Mac model since except the iMacs.
Oh hell yes! And they are also frequently edited or have scenes reordered as well, I assume to make the pacing feel more Hollywoodized. Basically Miramax bought the US rights, and is squashing any attempts to also release the original HK versions of the films. I wouldn’t mind if they just also had the originals on the discs as well, but full-screen panscan edited redubs? That’s pure evil.
A great example of “We’re losing money on every sale but we’ll make it up on volume”.
You can’t have it both ways. If a business is closed on Sunday, it’s not because “no one has the courage to speak up or take a stand.” Quite the opposite. They know they could bring in extra money by being open on Sunday, but choose not to based on their religious principles.
OK, yeah, that was actually my frustration at the rapidly fading battery life of my iPod speaking there. 
Alamo Rent A Car and their rental stations of tomorrow. They expanded their rental offices to include kiddie play stations, concession stands, and other waiting room amenities. This was because people had to stand in line for over an hour to rent a car.
The company forgot that people don’t want to stand in line for an hour to rent a car. Having a rental office set up this way showed customers the company expected them to have to wait a long time in line.
The money could have been spent to actually hire employees to process rental transactions!
Folding purchased brands into a single brand makes sense in most cases. You simplify purchasing, branding, advertising, all with economies of scale. You lose some local dedication, but it’s a calculated decision.
I just read a book that had plenty examples of Xerox’ weird, arguably stupid decisions about discoveries made in their PARC lab. It was a fabulous book (Dealers of Lightning) and I’d recommend it.
It was really stupid for ConEd to resist the move to alternating current for so long just because of the Edison-Tesla rivalry.
Boggle Is this a woosh? No, I guess not, eh?
I don’t rent cars very often and had never heard of that… But yeah, that’s a major, major boner all the way up to the top. “So, our #1 customer dissatisfaction is with the long time spent waiting? Solution… Make it more tolerable! Book parties on the Alamo line! Even if you won’t be renting a car, you’ll want to be there!” 
I still haven’t figured out why Time Warner ever thought merging with AOL would be a good idea.
Or why it took Apple so long to add gapless playback of MP3s to the iPod. Not that it stopped them from selling the 1-4th Gen iPods by the truckload anyway, but it kept me from buying one when I otherwise really, really wanted one…
And, in retrospect, Commodore really dropped the ball on marketing the Amiga 1000. As Byte Magazine put it in 1994 (when Commodore folded in bankruptcy):
How to replace your battery yourself:
Where to get your battery:
How about Osborne computers? In the early 80’s, Adam Osborne talked up the next version of the Osborne, making it seem so excellent that everyone stopped buying the current version. Having no money coming in, Osborne folded. The dreaded “Osborne Effect.” To see a company who is the exact opposite: Apple.
And Ford Motor Company. A few years ago, they renamed what had been the Taurus to the “Five Hundred” (letters, not numbers). After seeing poor sales, they renamed it “Taurus.”
Back to computers, remember IBM in the late 1980’s? Making the decision to rename all their PC’s with the PS/2 name and the Micro Channel bus that was incompatible with the ISA bus that the de facto industry standard. And charging a premium for that when the so-called clone market was busily reducing system prices.
I’ve done it - it’s terrifying but not difficult.
The Airbus offering is based on the Airbus A330, not the A380. The A330 is almost as old as the 767. Boeing has more back orders of the 767 than Airbus has of the A330, which is no longer being offered as a commecial airplane by Airbus. Who’s airplane is really “obsolete”? Also, the Boeing offer was well within the design guidelines as specified by the Air Force proposal, the EADS offering was technically outside the design parameters set by the Air Force. It is a bit bigger and can fly farther than what the Air Force originally specified. The EADS offering has never been built as a refueling tanker, Boeing has built 14 tankers based on the 767 for Italy and Australia. If Boeing had known that the Air Force would accept bids for an airplane that went beyond the minimum standards, such as carrying more fuel and flying farther, they could have offered the 777 as a tanker. Boeing has already done 75% of the engineering to build a 777 tanker already.
I do admit Boeing did drop the ball on this though, they could have offered a much better product than EADS. They relied on offering the same as they did 2 years ago, EADS took the time to make improvements with their offering.
I used to have an eBay store, selling prints of my photography. A couple of years ago, eBay more than doubled its fees for stores, while not raising its auction fees. Their reasoning was that they wanted store owners to put their items up for auction, rather than keeping inventory in the stores. Didn’t they think that if auctions were more profitable, I’d already been doing that? My particular inventory was more profitable to sell from a store. That is, until the increase in fees . . . which forced many of us to leave eBay entirely.
So, they’re not discontinuing them. But now they’re marketed under Macy’s, so no buying for me. Macy’s made a calculated decision–and lost me (a former employee of Field’s) as a customer. (and not just me–my mother cut up her Field’s card, as did my sisters and me). It may not keep Federated Dept stores up at night, but it makes me feel better.