Category: Business

Ripoff?

Business, Economics, Retailing

Let’s say you went into a little seaside diner feeling peckish, and saw that they had a menu item that read:  “2 slices of buttered toast”.

Sounds okay, yes?  (I’m going with “normal-person peckish” and not “American peckish” which would apparently require the entire loaf to satisfy that hunger pang.)

Then you see the price:  $5.00 for the two slices of buttered toast.

Ripoff?  Let’s analyze the thing.

I’m going to give the diner the benefit of the doubt here, and allow their claim that this isn’t Wonderbread and store-label butter, but a “premium” offering.  I’m also, for the purpose of the analysis, going to allow that they purchased the ingredients thereof at retail prices (they didn’t).

Our diner, by the way, would be located in the equivalent of coastal Florida, up in the Redneck Riviera.

So using my local gourmet store (Central Market) as a price guide, let’s look at the thing:

Let’s see what the unit cost is.  Assuming you’re doing thick-ish (e.g. “not-quite-Texan”) slice size, you’re going to get about 16 slices out of that loaf, assuming that we discard the ends, of course.  So: $5 / 16 = 31.25 cents ($0.3125) per slice; or 62.5 cents in total for the two.

Now the butter:  even assuming you slather the butter on like I typically do, you’re still going to use about 1/32oz per slice, ergo ending up with (8x 32 = 256;  398 / 256 = about 1.5 cents per slice or 3 cents for the menu item.

Total “cost”:  (31.25 + 1.5) x 2 = 65.5 cents ($0.655) for the two slices of buttered toast.

Now for the tricky bit.

Restaurants, from back when I still managed one, typically have had to mark up “cost” by 600% just to break even.  (Don’t even get me started on whether that’s the case in NYfC or Califuckingfornia:  it isn’t.)  This takes into account fixed overhead like salaries, supplies & equipment, utilities, real estate and so on (i.e. what it costs your diner each day before you get a single customer in the door).

So the extended cost of that 2-slice item works out to (errr carry the six) $3.93, before adding a single penny for gross profit. (And just so we’re clear:  $5 from $3.93 represents about 27% gross profit — I know, don’t make me laugh.)

Is $5, therefore, a total ripoff?

Not from where I stand, and this kind of analysis explains why you have to take your bank manager along to 5 Guys every time you visit them to get you and your wife a burger.

Here’s the article that prompted this post.

And Fuck Joe Biden, because about three years ago that $5 loaf of bread at Central Market used to cost $2.85, and the $4 butter about $2.75 (because I keep track of this kind of thing, even though the Gummint would prefer that I forget that the chocolate ration used to be 5 grams and not three).

[/Orwell]

So Much For That Diversity Thing

Business, Corporate Wokism, The Gun Thing

I remember once attending a board meeting of a company I worked at, and one of the agenda items was replacing a deceased board member.  One of the nominations for the replacement was some woman I’d never heard of, but as the nominator stated, “It’s time we had a little diversity on this board.”  And that’s all he said;  no mention of her qualifications, experience, nothing.

As the most junior executive in the room, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I couldn’t help wondering why nobody else had either.

Anyway, a vote was held and the nomination passed unanimously, albeit with one abstention (guess who).

This was back in the mid-1990s.

Anyway, it appears that one company has recently followed the same route — one assumes for the same reasons, only it backfired horribly on them.

Here’s the story:

On December 5, 2023, Breitbart News noted that shareholders disgruntled over Smith & Wesson’s continued manufacture of AR-15 platform rifles had filed a lawsuit. The suit claims that the defendants, who are Smith & Wesson board members and the company’s senior management team, “knowingly allowed the Company to become exposed to significant liability for intentionally violating federal, state, and local laws through its manufacturing, marketing, and sales of AR-15 style rifles and similar semiautomatic firearms.” . 

And who were these “disgruntled shareholders”?

Plaintiffs in the case included the Adrian Dominican Sisters, Sisters of Bon Secours USA, Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, and Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus & Mary.

…making me wonder:  what the fuck were Our Ladies Of The Blessed Disarmament doing anywhere near S&W’s management?

Anyway, they failed, the rotten rosary-swingers, and a jolly good thing it was too.

On March 13, 2024, Breitbart News reported that Nevada’s Clark County District Court signaled no “substantial likelihood” Smith & Wesson would be found liable, saying the activist shareholders appear not to be aligned with the company’s best interest and requiring them to post a half-million-dollar bond to continue their suit.

The plaintiffs were instructed to post the bond by April 23, 2024, but they did not.

On May 6, 2024, Judge Joe Hardy pointed to their failure to post the bond as ordered and dismissed the lawsuit against Smith & Wesson.

Errrrr “the activist shareholders appear not to be aligned with the company’s best interest” — I’ll say they aren’t.  They tried to get into the company to subvert its business — kinda like the Commies do in our school system — but it didn’t work.

If I were on the S&W board, I would file suit against these BoCs for compensatory damages for the legal fees, at least.

I know, I know:  something about “Vengeance is mine,”  saith the Lord.

Bollocks.

Pointless Shit

Marketing / Advertising, Modernism, Old Fartism, Technology

I’m always ranting about how the auto industry has overloaded basic transportation with evermore-complex technology (3 seat-position memory options? FFS), but of course, they’re not the only ones.

Here’s another example, seen via a link on Insty’s page:

What a load of bullshit.  My old Keurig essentially has two options:  size of cup, regular/strong brew, and that’s it.  (“High Altitude Setting”? FFS #2)

Oh wait… I forgot mine’s warning light for “There’s No More Water In The Reservoir, You Idiot, Can’t You See Through The Clear Plastic?”

Let’s not forget the lie of “Brushed Silver” when it’s just shiny plastic.

And forgive me, but the whole point of a Keurig is that you can make a cuppa quickly without waiting for the water to boil, so the “Auto On/Off” switch is the work of Satan.  (Yeah, “saves electricity” blah blah blah… fuck the whales.)

Needless to say, in the spirit of manufacturers everywhere, my model Keurig is no longer available;  so when it finally quits working, I’ll be forced to buy one of these multi-featured over-complex monstrosities at, of course, a price which is 40% more than I paid for mine.

Don’t even talk to me about the cost of replacing my ageing VW, or my soaring blood pressure will ensure that the Tiguan outlives its owner.

Well, So Much For That Tagline

Drive Time, Marketing / Advertising

We’re all accustomed to the advertising tagline from the Kraut carmakers which touts “German engineering” as the selling proposition for buying one of their overpriced cars.

That doesn’t seem to be the case, as evidenced by this J.D. Power survey of not so long ago:

It’s a large sample (80,000), by the way (the full methodology can be found here).

Basically, apart from all the Kraut shenanigans involved with cartels and illegal manipulations (diesel emissions coff coff etc.), it all boils down to the Germans making their cars evermore sophisticated but in doing so, more fragile and prone to breakage.

Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah, pretty much everywhere.

And people snigger when I say how much I’d prefer to drive something like a Merc 280 SL than any of their newer models…

Right In My Wheelhouse

Marketing / Advertising

I am approached almost daily by marketing people/companies who want to put ads in this website.  Most — okay, all — of them run and hide when I tell them my conditions… but I have no problem with putting up an ad hoc  ad like this one (because I believe in its cause):

If this isn’t worthy of our support, what is?

Mention my name, and nothing will happen — because this isn’t a paid endorsement.  See how that works?

“The Name’s Backless; Green Backless”

Corporate Fuckery, Technology

As the totalitarians / utilitarians / technology-worshipers in our midst try to push us evermore towards a cashless society, we see situations like this occur, this time in Britishland:

The IT meltdowns suffered by Sainsbury’s and Tesco highlight the dangers of relying on cashless payments which puts our society ‘at risk’, experts have warned.

On Saturday morning, Sainsbury’s experienced a ‘technical issue’ which created chaos for thousands of people on one of the busiest shopping days of the week.

The supermarket chain cancelled online orders and couldn’t accept contactless payments – so shoppers either had to pay in cash, or scramble to try and remember their PIN.

While people desperately queued to use nearby ATMs, the dramatic uptick in cash withdrawal meant many of the machines ran out.

Many loyal shoppers turned to rival chain Tesco – it also experienced issues with online orders, with a small proportion being cancelled.

By the way, you don’t have to be an “expert” to see the inherent dangers of over-reliance on technology;  you just have to be aware of the old maxim that to err is human, but to really fuck things up you need a computer.  And we’ve all been there.

Nor am I a conspiracy theorist, but at the same time the odds of a “technology meltdown” occurring in the UK’s two largest supermarket chains at the same time are, wouldn’t you say, rather alarming.

In another context, if the flight guidance systems malfunctioned simultaneously in both United Airlines and Air France — two unrelated corporations — there’d be all sorts of alarm and governmental enquiry commissions, not to mention screaming panic in the headlines.

Nor would the scenario of malignant agency be simply dismissed as paranoia — but here we are, where people can’t buy food for their families because of a “meltdown”.

You’d think that we’d have learned this little lesson during the previous lockdown, where all sorts of nonsense happened because “everyday life” was dislocated.

But we haven’t.

Just wait till Ford and Mercedes together experience “system failure” in their driverless car fleets…

Technology can be our friend, and often is.  But over-reliance on technology means it often isn’t.  Remember, the acronym MTBF (mean time between failures) is often used for reassurance, but it also presupposes the existence of failure.

Like what happened at Sainsbury and Tesco — simultaneously.

Update:  And now Greggs, too.