At a certain point you go from a startup innovating and worried about making more money to corporation maintaining the status quo and worrying about decreasing their expenses.
It’s the sunrise and sunset of an organization.
The most potential is at the beginning.
Steve Jobs talked about why companies fail a few times.
“If you are a product person you can’t influence the company to change direction much.
Who does get to influence it? The sales and marketing people.
They get promoted and paid so they run the company. This happens with technology companies that become monopolies like IBM and Xerox.
When you already have a monopoly share, the product people get driven out of decision making”
When a company has big company advantages, it is no longer in the growth stage. It is now on the defensive to keep from losing customers to something else.
The internet is full of examples of sunsetting corporation behavior
Staples
I used to work for Staples store, and I was told to only tell customers that we have the laptop or desktop in stock IF they want to buy additional installation services from us. (The reason for that is because Staples, Office Depot or Best buy, they all make money on those services, that’s also the reason why they cut down the price tag and call it on sale/discount.)
if a customer says they’re only interested on buying the unit itself, then I would go inside the storage, the techie stuff are locked so the manager would open the door for me and we both hang out there for 15mins then go out and tell the customers – we don’t have it in stock.. you know because it’s “on sale” it’s sold. out..
Tip: is to tell the technician or sales person that you are interested in installing the MS word or do the windows update service (which you can do by yourself at home) and specifically tell them you want to see the box first before they install any of the software. Once they bring out the product for you, and you have it in your hand, tell them you change your mind with the installation service. BECAUSE you are not paying until you get to the cashier, it’s not like they can charge you before you have the laptop in your hand. There was one time I witnessed my manager, they will take the product back and say this is actually reserved to another person already. which is F*ing shady and I left that company.
IKEA
Ikea stores force you to go through the entire store to leave.
TJ Max
Why have a floor plan or let you buy things online when you can go through all their products and decide what you want?
Gucci
Was an intern at gucci. The reason the sometimes treat you like shit/give you no attention is so you get more tempted to ”prove yourself” as important by buying something expensive.
Armani
My friend works at Armani, this is indeed something they tell you in training. Although they also tell you what kind of people to use this tactic on, you can easily tell who in a high end store; has money, who has A LOT of money, who’s just browsing, and who’s trying to look like they have more money than they really do. The latter are the perfect targets for this tactic