Long story short, after several years of swapping out ingredients and replacing manual labor with assembly lines, profits were up, but suddenly customers stopped buying. A new chocolate brand touting high quality ingredients and handmade chocolate was now the market leader. I guess the moral of the story is that you can chip away at your product quality for a little while, but eventually customers will notice.
Has anyone heard this story and have a link to a version of it?
That makes it hard to convince people to buy your product again if you try to re-improve the quality.
“No really. We’ve been intentionally making it crap for the last few years! We can make it better like it was.”
So, the manager who got fired, the first thing he did when he came onboard was to take an inventory of all the ingredients that were used, and how much they cost per pizza they were put on. Turns out that cheese was the most expensive ingredient. So, the guy cut back the amount of cheese they put on pizzas. Initially, there weren’t many complaints. So he cut some more. And more. And then there came a whole tidal wave of complaints. And massive losses of income and negative profits.
So, he restored the amount of cheese they put on pizzas, but started cutting the meats and proteins. And wound up with the same result. A tidal wave of complaints. And massive losses of profits.
That store ended up losing so many sales that their profit was negative over a full quarter, and that manager was fired. My friend, who was already working there and had been working there longer than anyone else and was very well respected by everyone, was promoted to be the new manager.
Turns out that he was only sixteen at the time, and that it wasn’t legal for him to be the manager of an establishment that sold alcoholic beverages for in-store consumption. Of course, this place was literally just across the street from the University of Oklahoma, so there’s no way that they could avoid selling alcoholic beverages to college students who were old enough. And they got caught.
As I recall the story, that was kind of the last straw for that store, and since that franchise had been on shaky ground for a while, they actually went bankrupt and the store shut down.
https://www.metafilter.com/154838/and-also-something-somethi...
It is excerpted from the book "Wired to Care", which I haven't read and which sounds platitudinous, but the story stuck in my mind.
There was also an interesting unofficial history of Friendly's Ice Cream written by someone who assistant-managed one for many years. I can't find it online now. But basically it said the higher-ups kept watching the sales figures as they played with the prices, the decor in the restaurants, the promotional advertising, etc. It all seemed pretty random. Then the guy drew a graph and the only thing that really correlated well with sales was the percentage of butterfat in the ice cream (more=richer / higher quality ice cream). They kept lowering it to make the ice cream cheaper to manufacture until the ice cream became crap, then they would restore it, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schlitz_Brewing_Company...