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Notes -
The opposite is true from a different vantage point. All businesses that aren’t ran horizontally are essentially command economies from the top.
I can also relate a different experience of my own back when I was younger and was an assistant manager at a local pharmacy/grocery store. Because vendors paid us to house their products and paid an additional premium for front row shelving space (this is what happens at virtually every grocery store you will ever go to), when the advertisement papers for the month went out to customers at the front of the store, pressure is put on all of us to upsell the customer on all the particular items resellers paid a spot in the advert for. Well, this is where one day things got interesting…
Naturally not every item that goes on sale or gets heavily promoted sells. Depending on what sells how much and when and where, products can easily get pushed into the background, cause price fluctuations or become delisted entirely. Anyway, there was another local store of ours that was being managed and the product was grossly underachieving its target for the month early on, based on their estimates. Well I came up with an idea to pair it with a different item we had that was about to go on sale (different from the ad sheet), create a table for it and sell it as a combo. It worked so unbelievably well it lost the store money. We sold out so quickly, huge amounts of customers were coming in and asking for rain checks on the item at it’s on-sale price, even after the sale had ended because our inventories couldn’t keep up. I ended up getting into trouble for that. One of the few times in my life I executed a task so well it actually completely backfired on me. My argument back to our director was that this came more as a failure of our policy when it came to honoring rain checks than it did as a sales pitch. Our task was to sell the item and you can bet your ass that I sold that item alright. Though when I was processing our paperwork for the month and was reviewing the numbers for everything I definitely scratched my head and spent considerable time reviewing things and said to myself “how in the fuck did this happen?…”
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