Consumer a cattle in the slaughterhouse
By -Venkat Praveen
When apple releases a new iphone or in general any new product people queue to buy it. It’s quite common picture at every release, but is it really necessary? are the logistics department at apple couldn’t anticipate the sales projection? No everything is well estimated and the products shipped are few enough to create the long line. You may wonder why? But company treats consumer like fools.
This is the tale about how poor loyal customers are barbequed by the companies. The consumer is like cattle, very special cattle, their milk is priceless but they don’t know their true value or potential. When a free calf is tethered it dislikes and tries hard to find its freedom, if it break out it will be free for rest of the life. Once the calf accepts the limitations, it forgets the freedom it once had and starts to falling for less important things. The mediocre feed given to it feels like an elixir making it forget the life once enjoyed by it. Companies follow the same rule of setting a mediocre satisfaction for the customer.
It all started small, at first bulbs used to last 25 years on average, the Phoebus cartel had a good hold on light bulb industry and they successfully brought down the life of the bulb. They thought a bulb lasting for 25 years is not so good the industry. It seems normal for a bulb to blow in few weeks. For god sake we are in space age and a normal bulb can’t last mere weeks. Company’s conditioning is working well on the customers and they were accepting mediocrity. Now companies started fight among the consumers with showing them a little shinier or a little more colourful object. Always showing customers what’s next, a little more dangle a little more vibrance is enough to bind the customers.
Poor customers couldn’t figure out what is happening to them. Classic example of fooling the customers is the environment friendly logo stating less usage of lead. Soldering circuit board using lead is vital for components and using less than specified generally leads to tin whiskers. This word may look funny but the meaning is not, due to less than required lead the soldering given out tiny whiskers and due time these things will short the circuit. The companies are making sure that the product won last more than 7 to 10 years.
The Thailand floods were a nice opportunity for the companies to hike the hard disk prices. But never bother to get them down again even though full production has restored at the facilities. The poor consumers had long forgotten the normal price and are falling into the pit.
Few legal ways in which company fool (screw) the customers:
- Premium badge: thanks to digitisation, the types of cables have skyrocketed. They say superior speeds, high bandwidth and all that blah blah blah, but in reality it’s all howack. Technically there is no difference between SATA-II and SATA-III cables. The protocol revision doesn’t affect the cable to maintain back ward compatibility, but this won’t stop companies from re labelling it, changing a colour and charging a premium for it. Few companies add weird wiring and promise bandwidth even the protocol doesn’t support. If confused take an HDMI cable with “High speed internet “or a basic HDMI 1.4. Some companies does a firm ware update release same product with new product.
- Choice for a higher price: let’s take example of external HDDs. The diff in prices for the USB-SATA interface ICs for USB2.0 and 3.0 is minimal, roughly 70-90 cents yet the finished product varies by few hundreds and generally 1700. May be you want a fancy fire wire interface instead, sure u can have that too for just 2450 only. Then again, if u want tha latest in market like a thunderbolt adapter then you have to shed a mere 6600.
- Wacky warranty plans: Not all products have their warranty started from the day of purchase. Rather it starts on the day of import; sometimes there will be an offset of 2-3 months if you are lucky. When u buy a product after 1 or 2 years of shipping then you already ran out of warranty. If the dates are perfect and starts from purchase there is again dealer warranty and manufacturer warranty. No one really cares who gave the warranty but you should because if it’s a dealer warranty there is a healthy chance of the product getting here without the knowledge of manufacturer or didn’t clear the customs etc.
- Bells and whistles: ever wonder why companies make same kind of chips with different clock speeds and price different. In reality they don’t, they all are same chips, then why are they different? They are produced in batches and some batches fail so the clock speeds are reduced and released as low prices chips. The same goes with the CPUs with 3 cores, we work in a binomial world so 3 cores never fit into picture. They simply shutdown a core to improve stability. There are again labels stating k-series, extreme, x-series and such like , these from batches were every went according t plan.
- Broken promises: a classic example of broken promises is when Sony has launched its PS3. They are many features in it people loved. But in later updates Sony ignored its promises and removed this functionality in later updates. These include compatibility for PS2 games and the ability to run other operating systems like Linux. There was a court trial against the big media giant but the petitioners lost the case. Many companies had broken the promise made to their loved customers.
It’s just the way businesses are run. Managers have a commitment toward wealth maximization for shareholders, and that’s exactly what they think of when they plan product, pricing, promotion, placement, and service.