659
AskReddit is over run by bots
(files.catbox.moe)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
659 points (97.5% liked)
17443 readers
111 users here now
News and Discussions about Reddit
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
Rule 1- No brigading.
**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **
YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.
Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.
**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
:::spoiler Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Gather round, children, and let me tell you a story of the same type of mindless corporate stupidity that happened in my state, about how something successful was ruined because all they could see was at the surface level...
When the mini-market chain AM/PM opened some stores in Baja California, they came up with a hybrid concept that also included a made-to-order fast food kitchen serving burgers, and a sizable seating area, they called this Dave's Kitchen. It was a huge, huge hit.
Enter 7-11 into the scene. Getting wind of this new phenomenon and armed with corporate cash from their Mexico offices in... Monterrey I think it was... they bought every AM/PM in the state and converted them to 7-11s, surely salivating at the prospect of this large client base that was supposedly built-in with their acquisition.
So what was the first thing they did?
They shuttered Dave's Kitchen. Poof... gone!
They got rid of the soda machine, the ice cream machine... instead of assimilating the business model of what they had bought, they got rid of everything that made these AM/PMs unique in the market, replaced it with their own bland and generic way of doing things according to the home office in Monterrey.
Within a month, the new 7-11s had lost around 3/4 of their customers. Their emergency response was to send in a squad of corporate poll takers to pester the customers still there and see... why the other ones had gone, I guess?
Asking the wrong questions (why did the customers leave in droves?) to the wrong people (the few remaining clients who didn't leave). And thus, nothing of value was learned, because when your corporate business school suits are clumsy unthinking hammers, every situation and problem look like a goddamned nail.
Perhaps they realized it would be cheaper to stop the growth of a superior product. Especially when that superior product would likely require more types of costs that would eat corporate level profit. More higher paid employees that can't be mechanized.
Status quo is incredibly profitable, assuming nothing threatens it. That's why big business does everything they can to increase the barrier of entry, and happily overpays to buy out successful competitors, with the leadership of the competitors having enforceable noncompetes for the model.
The fact that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup. This kind of thing regularly happens as well where I live despite noncompetes basically not being enforceable.
Acquiring companies is easy, but it extremely rarely goes well. The incentives and skills required to buy something and give a sales pitch to a private equity firm simply do not overlap with the incentives and skills required to vertically integrate that thing without completely destroying it.
In many ways these corporate ghouls are like serial hobbyists. Buying all kinds of expensive toys and tools they don't understand then breaking them and/or giving up.
Obviously absolute speculation on my part, but if they were truly doing what I suggested intentionally, part of the plan would need to be plausible deniability to avoid anti-monopoly issues, and also public sentiment nightmare. Killing your favorite shop out of incompetence doesn't win good will, but you will still go there. Doing it out of malicious intent could have people in other states joining a boycott.
I'm in management, participated in the acquisition process of the company I'm at being acquired. At least at the 150mm/year revenue level there's no one doing the shit I'm suggesting, no one is so competent. Cash on hand is bad , acquisition is an obvious way to deal with that. You're spot on about skills though, 95% of management at every level is totally incompetent at the work required to actually do management shit. All the competent people leave as soon as they can because the work just got way harder and the money doesn't follow.