Rant subject: Bean counters

[a nameless entity]

Actually the title is misleading. It isn't the bean counters themselves who set me off. It's the idiot bosses who take their data and misuse it. Allow me to rant about a rather mundane little thing that I believe shows how insidious this kind of thing can be.

Today I decided to buy some gel type automatic dishwasher soap at the grocery store. There were two sizes of the brand I decided to buy available. A large 2.6 liter bottle for $6.99 and a smaller 1.6 liter bottle for $3.49. Now in the old days, if you wanted to save money in the long run, you would buy the larger size because it would work out to be cheaper. But for the last 5 or 6 years or so, or perhaps even longer, I have been noticing that it now costs more to buy the large size. In this case you not only save a penny by buying two of the smaller sized bottles, but you actually get 600 ml more for doing so!
This is sheer madness. It is supposedly more expensive to fill, package, transport, and handle many smaller bottles than fewer large ones. You also are "greener" when you use the large bottles because you use less packaging. So what the hell is going on here???

The only thing that I can think of that explains this increasing trend is that the grocery chain powers-that-be are padding the bottom line by counting on the ingrained habits of their customers who just automatically buy the larger size because they are conditioned to think that it is cheaper to do so, and do not compare prices.

Talk about abusing your own customers! Are all bosses total idiots these days?

[Hermskii]

I think so possibly!

[ZippityDooDa]

Two Words..... WAL MART.

[a nameless entity]

Perhaps it's obvious to everyone who has read the thread, but on the other hand maybe not. I was trying to show how a general trend can show up even in something as trivial as the price of a bottle of soap. This has been well reported in the past and has been going on in North American society, and probably the whole world's for far too long and seems to be all pervasive: Far too much reliance on the "bottom line". It seems this nonsense has displaced all logic, common sense, and even morality.

I could go on and on with examples, but will stick with just one, such as the highly successful Canadian branch of the "Olive Garden" restaurant chain that was unexpectedly shut down some years ago because their earnings were not as high as the restaurants in the USA. Well of course they weren't. It costs more to do business up here, and the market is smaller. It didn't matter that the restaurants were full up every night, and making lots of money. It wasn't "enough" money, and so the whole chain was shut down over night. The owners lost their expensive franchises, the suppliers lost valuable customers, and the owners and their employees and who knows how many others that worked servicing the restaurants, all lost their jobs. Simply because the person then running the company wanted to improve the look of the bottom line. She probably got a fatter end of year bonus by fiddling with the numbers, and didn't give a damn who she hurt to get that fatter bonus either, I'll bet.

So one small example and one large one. We've seen the results of such idiocy taken to the extreme with the recent economic downturn. How long will it take before things get back to a more humane standard? Or will it ever get better in that regard?