- Joined
- Dec 9, 2021
- Messages
- 735
This is the legacy of what I call "Pump and Jump" management. A company is falling behind others in profitability, so they hire someone with a record of making companies more profitable. The new CEO cuts corners to save expenses, and that makes the products less reliable and/or perform worse that the prior ones. People buy the cheapened (not necessarily cheaper product and the reputation eventually goes down the tubes. By then, the CEO (and his highest-ranking henchmen) have jumped to a new job, with another sucker company that will show increased profitability for a while, before the reputation is ruined by the degraded product. Then it will take years, or decades to recover. Some never recover.I will state up front, I do not want the government trying to “protect” me in any way what so ever from companies ruining their reputation. The only protection I want is transparency, it is my job as a consumer to research what I buy and I only want it required that companies cannot hide negative information. If they did that, I think half the companies would be bankrupt in a month…
I have no problem with a company building $hitty products and letting the market sort things put, that is what a free market is supposed to do, but we are buying products based on a company’s past reputation, and that is where the problem comes in, we need to learn we can’t do that any longer. We bought our Whirlpool appliances based on their reputation, we won’t be making that mistake again. It takes years until enough of the market realizes company X is now crap, and many of us that have bought their products for years, pay the price. But, that company also spends years paying the price when they realize their dumb mistake and try to fix it.
This is exactly what happened to Black & Decker. It got so bad, the professional tools had to be redesigned after the CEO left, but professional customers would no longer even look at a tool with the B&D name on it. The company had to make the tools a completely different color and dredge up the trademark of Dewalt (a company that they had bought out long before, and which had a reputation for well-designed and long-lived power tools) in order to get back into the market.