Once a month I do a lunch with a local small business group. Our lunch this month was yesterday.

One of the speakers, who runs a business making pre-packaged salads that are sold in grocery/convenience stores, told a story about increasing their profits. They did "focus group tests," and found that if they put 1 ounce less lettuce/greens in their product, and 1/2 oz. less dressing, consumers didn't notice, and considered it just as good as before.
So they cut back on the greens by 1 ounce, and the dressing by 1/2 ounce, and saved just over a penny per salad. Of course they sold it at the same price as before! And since they sell about 25,000 salads per month, that extra penny increased their profits by $250 per month. Big win, and the 'moral' was don't overlook the little things!

As I was listening, I couldn't help but think of TSCC, and the leaders running it as a business...

Let's get rid of janitors, and get the members to clean the toilets themselves. We can make that tiny change, nobody will care, and we'll increase our profits.

Let's centralize missionary funds, and only dole out a 'standard' amount to all missionaries, cutting back on what they get. Nobody will care about that tiny change, and we'll increase our profits.

Etc.

Over and over they make little cut-backs, hoping the members won't notice or care, to increase profits. And laugh all the way to the bank.

It's a reasonable way to run a business. I don't know about a "church."

There are two schools of thought:

1. make as much money as you can by cutting corners and hoping the customers don't notice,

and

2. don't cut corners and hope that the customers do notice, and reward you with their continued business.

Since it's a possibility that neither is an absolute truth, it makes sense that both schools of thought have their fans. And whom you'd rather have admire you, your bank or your customers, probably contributes to the choice.

Option 3 is the beauty of market forces.

Seize your competitor's cost-saving measure as an opening to flout your new "Bigger Portion -- Same Low Price!" salad. Invest the extra penny to offer more than he does, and make sure you do all you can to get the consumer to notice it.

Perhaps the Baptists should start competing for Mormons to come on over with a similar concept: "You're invited to sing, and we won't assign you to clean!"

Tall Man, Short Hair Wrote:
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> Perhaps the Baptists should start competing for
> Mormons to come on over with a similar concept:
> "You're invited to sing, and we won't assign you
> to clean!"

Brilliant marketing!
Of course, they'll need to add, "You won't get your own planet or a harem of wives with us, but then you won't get them from mormonism, either!" :)

Have you looked at the weight on products? No more 8oz. chips or half gallon ice cream (except at Trader Joe's!). Everything is 11.5 oz. or other non-sensical weight.

But same price!

I think it was Rockefeller who observed that saving a half penny by using only one washer or grommet on some item really added up when you make a million of said item...

Shocktop beer is marketing a 10-pack of 11.5 ounce 'aluminum bottles' for the same price as a 12-pack of 12 ounce glass bottles. I have exemplars of each in the 'frig. They were out of the glass bottles, and the sale price was so low that I took the last 10-pack, despite the gnawing in the pit of my being that I was being made to play the fool.

144 oz. of beer v. 115 oz. of beer, both for the same price. Okay, I really was a fool...

How depressed and uninspired you'd have to be to make a product that's worse for such a minuscule gain.

And that salad guy sucks too.

My favorite is they market and hype it up like its the best thing ever. Make it look shiny/pretty/distinctive. Differentiate on minor matters.

Sell it for 3X or more of the price.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/11/2015 02:39PM by the1v.

And it's done, of course, by "bean counters!"

Two anecdotes:

1) I was chatting with a millenial by the coffee in my local supermarket. I picked up a 12-oz bag, and remarked, "I remember when coffee was always packaged by the pound."

He looked at the package, and said, "It is--see? A one-pound bag."

"No, it's only 12 ounces."

"That's right, Twelve ounces. One pound."

So now you see, partly, how markets get away with this!

# # # #

2) Some years ago, Consumer Reports, in their excellent back-page feature called "Selling It," showed the before-and-after packages for Lipton's Onion Soup. The "Before" had five 3-oz envelopes in it, 15 ounces. The "After" had three 4-oz packages, 12 ounces total.

The "After" was brightly posted as, "New, larger servings!"

Whenever I see, "Same Great Taste--Bright New Look!" I expect it to be a smaller package.

Incidentally, these gimmicks camouflage a much higher rate of consumer product inflation than the Administration lets on.

CPI would measure the per unit price, which is required labeling in most states. If your price per ounce goes up, it will be reflected in the CPI.

The trouble is, at least in the stores that I visit, the price per unit is disguised. There may be 5 brands/sizes of olive oil, for example. One or two may be at the cost per ounce on the little shelf label. And the others will be cost per unit, the unit being whatever the size of each bottle is. And each brand's bottle holds a different amount.

The system only works if all of a given kind of product are labelled using the same units. Or if I have time to stop and run everything into my calculator.

And for sale prices, they don't ever show cost per unit of any sort.

For the most part, in Masschussetts, retailers provide price-per-unit in equivalent units, so all the soups are "per oz." Sometimes there are irregularities--Brand "A" is "per oz" and Brand "B" is "per qt." Liquids are more vulnerable to confusion, one being per Fluid Ounce, and another being by weight.

In my state, the sales stickers always have (fine print!) the unit price. What's annoying is when a line, say, "Selected varieties" of something like pasta are on sale. You think that linguini is on sale, you get home, and -- SURPRISE!! -- it wasn't one of the "selected varieties."

Here's a tip: those coupons you cut out in the Sunday paper? Ignore the expiration date. Rarely is that included in the bar code. Just go through the self-check-out and scan it yourself. If it fails, get the attending clerk* to process it. He'll probably do an over-ride.

*He's probably got an IT degree, but can't get a job because some H1-B Visa immigrant came in from India and and took his job minimum wage.

Politics! Politics!

I'm having the vapors again!!!

The question is, how many fewer salads did they sell by skimping? The speaker assumes the customer won't notice, and chances are most won't. Even if they do, they may not say anything, but they may stop ordering salads, or they may go somewhere that doesn't cut corners.

SW Airlines prides itself on customer service, but when the reduced seat size by 1" and cut 1/2" inch of stuffing from their seats, the customers noticed. Even if they didn't immediately lose profits, it hurt their reputation and put them in the same category as Spirit Airlines, who cut corners to the bone for every penny they pinch.

I was born in a brick hospital in the mountain town of La Grande, Oregon. We didn't know much about retail practice, but we did have the story of one Mormon fellow who claimed to have it all worked out.

This fellow had a mule, they said, who liked to eat him out of house and home. He figured he could save a tithe's worth of money by feeding his mule 90 parts grain and 10 parts sawdust. He had his program goin' so well, he upped the sawdust content twiced as much.

A couple of skeptics in town asked how was his program with the feed substitution going. He said he'd had to call it off, as the mule died unexpected.

Don.

Both my wife and I are EOU grads in La Grande.

I met my wife and left TSCC there. It holds great memories for me. It's still a nice little school.

I was born in LaGrande too.

Another trick: Two pairs of pants for the price of one. One pair costs $100.00. Two pairs cost $50.00/ piece. It costs the store$15.00 to manufacture one pair. You think you are getting a deal but no. Just another scam.

I am sure, since we are in fudge season, that Warren Buffett shrank the Kraft marshmallow creme from the origin 14oz to the current 13oz.

I forget which major league baseball stadium was selling Lg and Sm beers. Problem was, the large beer cup and the small beer cup held the exact same amount. They just had different shapes. ha. Greatness for the seller that is.

The same type of thinking leads to changing to part-time employees and paying them less and no insurance benefits. Greater profits, but to what purpose? Short term thinking is what is driving business today, and it is driving this country into the ground.

hear hear!! A simple truth, elegantly stated.

While the OP's story was aimed at pointing out how Mormonism shortchanges its adherents, it reminded me of one of the jokes I read in the first braille edition of Boys' Life I received many, many moons ago:

A witch found that a lot of people liked her tea recipe so she opened a business and began selling her tea and making a large profit. She soon discovered, however, that she could make even more money if, instead of throwing the teabags away after one use, she kept reusing them, thereby saving money on the number of teabags she had to purchase. Unfortunately for her, with each reuse, the tea in the teabags became weaker (less tea), customers did notice, and within months, the witch was out of business.

The moral of the story? Honest tea is the best policy.

Mormons will probably ignore it, but I think this moral should apply to them, too.

Honesty is no longer an absolute (if it ever was, but I honestly think it did once exist). Blame rests on a whole host of people, but it's very easy to see that the ad writers are really deeply involved.

"...and our product is clinically studied to measure success!"

Isn't that a brilliant line? Makes my ad writer's heart bubble joyously. The voice that utters it on the radio is deep, resonate and reeks of trust and honesty.

There are people who want to make a honest living and there are people who want to get rich. And then there's the really tricky ones, the ones who want to get rich making an honest living.

elderolddog Wrote:
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> Honesty is no longer an absolute (if it ever was,
> but I honestly think it did once exist).

"You 'HONESTLY' think it did once exist"....?

You wouldn't mislead us now, would you, ElderOldDog?

On a serious note, dishonesty is a sin (an out-moded word, if not concept, I know), which brings to mind Mark Twain's quip that "Original sin is the one Christian doctrine that is empirically provable."

As I am going nowhere, there is no where I could mislead you!

I should have said 'sincerely'.

I am a great fan of Honesty. I employ it as often as I safely can.


I was recently hired as an intermediary in a dispute involving Middle Eastern business men. My client was an ordinary West Side Jewish attorney whose dealings with people from the Levant was as limited as mine. He wasn't exactly sure what the Middle Eastern guys on his side of the dispute wanted done.

I went to see the Middle Eastern point person on the other side, at his store. When I was ushered into his presence, I started my spiel with, "Look, I honestly have no idea what's going on and I don't know what I can possibly accomplish during this meeting..." And then we began talking about the "Situation."

About ten minutes into the conversation he raised his voice and said, "You don't have the slightest idea what's going on, do you!" He meant to insult me. But I asked him, "What did I tell you when I first walked in? Did I tell you that I had no idea what was going on, along with no idea what this conversation was going to accomplish?"

His eyes got wide... "Yeah, you did." And he laughed. We got along just fine after that, but I still left not knowing what was going on, which confirmed that the conversation had not really accomplished much.

But that night I did solve the problem, by chatting up a Mexican woman who runs a business two doors down and it turned out that she knew EVERYTHING about the men, the situation and the problem.



Honesty is the best policy, as long as the subject doesn't involve jeans or pants, as seen from the rear.

elderolddog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> But that night I did solve the problem, by
> chatting up a Mexican woman who runs a business
> two doors down and it turned out that she knew
> EVERYTHING about the men, the situation and the
> problem.

So...two mexicans saved the day? Bien!

Rockefeller can kiss my ass...its the very ugliness of this philosophy that has caused capitalism to price a human life at 58 cents...yup the cost of making an ignition switch that will remain in position to one that wont...cost analysts determined even if death resulted and lawsuits resulted it was more profitable to install an inferior key switch...herein lies the problem in my opinion...it isnt whats right or ethical or true its what can be flim flammed lied about or obfuscated...and mankind becomes a whore for fifty eight cents

The real victim here is TRUST...how seldom can you buy anything anymore that isnt riddled with defects or non existant warranty that you paid for...there was a time business could be conducted with a handshake and both parties could rest assured that obligations and expectations would be met...today GOOD! Business is considered by sharp pencils and corner cutting rather than honest value for honest dollar...whether you believe in christ or not...the golden rule isnt a bad way to treat each other

Coffee to me was the most egregious example. I remember when you bought coffee by the pound. That trained me to look carefully at packaging. I always notice when manufacturers are offering less than before. Sometimes they do it by altering the shape of the package to make you think you are getting the same amount.

My community newspaper is suffering the same fate. The cost has gone up over the years and often people don't have the time nor desire to read it anymore. But the most common complaint I hear is that it has gotten "too thin." If you keep offering less and less product, people do notice.

Mormonism has been offering less and less to its members. Now they have to clean their churches and temples. Funds for ward activities are a joke. At what point will the members realize that other churches offer a far better value for money (and time) spent?