A man who destroyed his multimillion dollar company in 10 seconds (2018)
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
Firstly the audience loved the jokes, they laughed at them all. It wasn't like he delivered them to stunned faces and immediate shock. The only thing that brought him down was a newspaper reporter noted it down and newspapers pushed it as an artificial scandal. Everyone buying 5 pound earrings knew they were of very low quality, they just didn't want it being shouted at them in their daily news.
Secondly it wasn't even the first time he had publicly made these sorts of jokes, in fact it wasn't even the first time they had been published in the papers.
This was entirely a newspaper driven downfall, they wanted to see him fail and wanted to sell papers about a scandal, so they did.
The group carried on and became one of the biggest jewelery companies on the planet.
The speech scandal was merely a blip in the history of the company.
> This was entirely a newspaper driven downfall
That first point is good evidence that the jokes weren't very responsible for what happened.
But it seems like it's just as good evidence that newspaper coverage also wasn't very responsible. Why attribute it to the newspapers this time, when they tried and failed before?
Newspapers report on people all the time and then switch when it suits them, it's always trying to move with people. It's also worth noting the reporter, Harry Arnold, worked for The Mirror, a less than reputable rag. Arnold knew ahead of time that Ratner was to make these jokes (heard about it through his assistant I believe) and was there waiting for the moment he could quote him. The scandal was prepared before it had even happened. They didn't force him to say those things, but they sure made an enormous deal out of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession#Civil_un...
Luxuries are typically the first thing to go for those close to poverty in a recession.
I would argue that Ratners were uniquely placed to suffer the worst in a recession, and that they hadn't collapsed during the aftermath of Black Monday is the bigger surprise.
It was the tabloid press, targeting their readers, that brought Ratners down. I don't know why they did it though apart from increasing their sales by generating buzz about a subject maybe.
“After losing everything, he toiled in misery for years — but he eventually made an improbable comeback. In 1997, he took out a £155k (US$203k) loan on his house, built up a health club business, and sold it for £3.9m (US$5.1m). He then used the profits to start an online jewelry company. (The Ratners Group rebranded as Signet in 1993; today, it is the largest diamond retailer in the world.)”
Most people reading this will never feel extreme hunger and have all their material needs met forever, but they will probably also go through things that to them, feel like miserable failures.
You might even be forced to leave your cushy jobs and take an annual salary that is what 50 African laborers make in year. And it will possibly take years, maybe well over a decade, to live down how bad you feel about yourself.
Whether you're scrambling around the forest looking for berries and killing things to eat with pointy sticks or working an office job living in a suburb – I don't really think your emotional experience really changes all that much.
I think your misery and delight are driven by the best and worst things in your life and it doesn't really matter all that much what your circumstances are. When things get better you find new things to be miserable about, when things get worse you stop caring about the little things and your misery is driven by the new worst thing.
I don't see standard of living really driving all that much happiness. Maybe some, but much less than I think most people expect.
Happiness is definitely a hockey-stick shaped curve, going from 1M to 10M is not going to make you happier, but someone who is making $100k is going to be far far happier than someone making $20k. The difference between scrabbling to pay your bills and keep the heat on, vs actually having some savings and free money for recreation, is absolutely massive.
- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
I think there are a few key things that drive happiness. Secure food and shelter. Short commute. Nature. Being able to walk away from toxic jobs and relationships.
Just today
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/juul-ceo-kevin-burns-tells-non-...
- Lulumon didn't seem to be hurt by Chip Wilson. In fact, the "notoriety" made me aware they they sold men's clothes, too, and I went there and bought some great athletic wear.
- Many customers appreciated Barclays' warning not to "pile up debts." That would give me a favorable opinion of a company that offers lines of credit, not a bad one.
For a time, I could buy jeans that fit. That's now all but impossible. Skinny jeans doing much of that.
Prices and fabric quality have gone, respectively, through the ceiling and floor.
I'm approaching a decade denim-free, having broken in my first pair sometime in the 1970s.
Baggy in the waist, cannot get my thighs in.
Pretty sure that was Nike, Adidas, and Puma.
It’s a fascinating interview and one of the best in the “How I Built This” series.
Your engineer is showing
True.
Nowadays, it only takes one tweet to absolutely tank someone's reputation, let alone lose his or her job.
Didn't seem to bother people though. Maybe the "hooligans or whatever" who shop there don't pay any attention to the news?
Eg Holland has a number of cheap shoe chains. Schoenenreus and Scapino both breathe an air of cheapness, and one went bust and the other is struggling bad. Their direct competitor Van Haren sells exactly equally crappy shoes, and everybody knows it, but they are thriving, simply because the store feels like a proper high quality shoe store.
Or take ALDI, which competes on price and nothing else. In every country I visited has the words "the ALDI principle: low prices, high quality" printed on every storefront and on every page of their paper promo flyers. Granted, little of what they sell is "total crap", but little is of truly high quality either. Their bread goes stale faster and their coffee is bitter. This surprises nobody.
It appears to me that this weird dichotomy is the only way to successfully compete on price. Make it perfectly obvious that you're cheap and of mediocre quality at best, while loudly shouting that the quality is high. Nobody believes you, but nobody wants to buy from you if you're honest about what you're selling.
I find this surprising because blatant lies don't generally work that well in the long term, so why do they here? I generally hate dishonest messaging. Why don't I mind here? I buy ALDI and Van Haren all the time.
Interestingly, I wonder why this would be a metric of lower quality bread rather than higher? I mean, the obvious way to make the bread last longer would be to pump it full of preservatives, and the white stuff you buy pre-sliced in packs lasts for ages though it is not really bread and the quality is obviously low (or is it? The slices are so smooth, the bubbles so even and the crust not hard at all)
When I have been to France and bought a baguette in the morning, obviously it is normally eaten right away because fresh and delicious, but if you leave it until the afternoon it is already stale and chewy. Does that imply low quality?
(I do buy some food from Aldi, though I prefer my bread from the baker across the road :)
The same goes for supermarket bread vs fresh bread from the baker's: supermarket bread is better suited for freezing and thawing later compared to fresh bread from the bakery. The latter tastes much better, but has to be eaten the same day.
You can use sourdough, which is also "pumping it full of preservatives", just ones that are produced naturally right in the dough while it ferments. Sourdough bread takes more time, so it would make sense for it to be more expensive. So it makes sense for cheaper bread to go stale faster.
AFAIR if you go into a French bakery and order a "tradition" instead of a "baguette" you get a baguette made with sourdough.
Same in the US with Target and Walmart. They sell exactly the same discounted products, in giant stores that carry everything, to exactly the same customers, but Target has cultural cachet (both embodied and mocked as "Tar-jay"), while Walmart and its customers are mocked (if you're nice) and denounced (if you're not) incessantly. Somehow, the giant retail chain corporation based in Arkansas is seen as the embodiment of all that is evil with American business—to the point where San Francisco and New York City don't allow any within their borders—while the giant retail chain corporation based in Minnesota is seen as (relatively) hip and culturally/political acceptable enough to have outlets in the downtowns of said cities.
And walmart.com is built to be a marketplace, like amazon.com, so of course it allows resellers.
You can hate what Walmart is and stands for, but to find Target acceptable is inconsistent.
This is less insidious than it sounds. Walmart's strategy is a volume play - they optimize their product mix against selling the highest volume of products, rather than products that may have a higher individual margin but lower sales volume.
They're also intimately familiar with the elasticity of price for everything they sell. If a manufacture comes to them with Product A, Walmart won't purchase Product A if they can't price it at the optimal point for their target market (which encompasses a large cross section of the general population). But their procurement volume is so high that they can commit to absurdly large order quantities. So instead of just walking away, they'll work with the manufacture to comb through the bill of materials[1] and adjust things such that a Variant B of Product A can be produced more efficiently or cheaply, then sold to Walmart at a wholesale rate that allows them to hit their target retail price. This can be as simple an adjustment as reducing a 3 year warranty down to a 1 year warranty. Or swapping out a fragile but sleek looking component with a more robust but worse looking (or heavier) component, thereby reducing expected warranty claims and overall product cost. Or if they feel a particular component is likely to not be used by 90% of their purchasers (i.e. a marketing gimmick the manufacturer threw in for differentiation) they'll ask for it to be removed. Or if a particular component is overbuilt for their audience they'll ask it to be swapped out with a lower quality component (keeping in mind that Walmart has lots of data from returns to understand what does and doesn't work well). Or it could be a feature that is turned off/disabled to give the manufacturer cover for selling (and letting Walmart sell) the product below the equivalent product sold to other retailers.
Keep in mind that returns and warranty claims all cost money, as well. And at the volume of sales Walmart has, even minor increases in these can have very noticeable increases in costs/decreases in profitability and negate the entire benefit of creating a new product variant to hit a specific price point. So in that vein, you can be sure that the new variant will meet the consistent quality expectations of products purchased at Walmart, even if they don't necessarily meet the quality expectations you might have of purchasing that brand elsewhere. It's basically a private label product commissioned by Walmart that still happens to have the manufacturer's brand name attached to it.
Target and other large retailers do the same thing, they just don't necessarily have the volume to have enough leverage to get manufacturers to do it on as many things as Walmart does, nor the internal competencies to do it at such a deep level. They also have different points of price sensitivity for products, based on the particular demographics of their consumers. You're more likely to see fuzzying around with quantities/volumes instead, since the primary manufacturing run is the same and you only require a custom pack during final packaging.
And to that point, manufacturers do the same thing themselves frequently. Consumers are price sensitive and manufacturers for years have been absorbing price increases on raw materials while maintaining price points. They do so by either maintaining the same quality of individual units and just silently shaving off quantity, or else decreasing the quality and maintaining quantity. These changes usually come along with refreshes/redesigns of product packaging, in an attempt to mask them from notice.
Shopping at a local Walmart 20 years ago was an unpleasant experience. Junk in the aisles, which were quite narrow, making it hard to maneuver past other shoppers. Insufficient fluorescent lighting. All kinds of things that spoke "cheap". Just overall bad.
Nowadays, there's little to distinguish Target from Walmart... aside from the red vs. blue color scheme.
I guess the trick only works because it's a safety sensitive business, and the same approach wouldn't work for, say, a supermarket or a jewelry brand.
Granted their current website is fairly decent/usable.
They offer lots of good quality things, so better to say they have the best price/quality ratio.
They sometimes also buy everything you have to get a cheaper price (a friend of mine has a rather large vegetable farm, and they offered to buy literally all the produce to get a lower price.. he doesn't have to deal with sales that year, and they get it cheaper).
I like aldi, and buy a bunch of stuff there (i'm not sponsored by them), but at the same time, you know what you're buying - need a drill? They sell a perfectly ok one for really cheap... for a casual user, who uses a drill once every few months.
What I don't like is some other stores selling the same items (just branded differently) for 2x the price. If you need a good drill for professional use, there are just a few companies that make them good - and you probably know them all. If you need something cheap, you'll get it cheaper at a store like aldi (or lidl, or similar) than at [hardware store] under their brand, or even some reputable brands.
Stupid example: https://www.productreview.com.au/listings/aldi-food-dehydrat... This was sold here for 30eur at aldi.
Gorenje is/was a reputable brand here, and they sell theirs for 50eur: https://www.mimovrste.com/susilniki-sadja/gorenje-susilnik-h...
Just look at the photos and compare.
I'm Dutch and I didn't know that. I don't buy shoes frequently enough to notice such things, so I might be fooled by their looks.
So the looks matter.
Shopping isn't just about the products themselves. It's also about the experience of shopping, wouldn't you say? If I had to choose between cheap + bad shopping experience and cheap + nice shopping experience, the latter would be a no-brainer!
Ratner merely put down the last piece that flipped almost the whole board. Marketing is usually the uphill struggle to persuade anyone looking at the board that "white is winning" when it is really anyone's game.
But eventually one piece is played, often a public failure, and everyone realises the board was destined to be black anyway.
It's much harder to play this marketing game when you are selling costume jewellery or other fashion lead items. And the odds of someone flipping the board are high without you realising it.
But people play it that way anyway.
What made the brand successful wasn't what Ratner thought it was.
The word at hand here is 'hubris'. Successful people slowly lose touch with the rest of the world and eventually make a colossal screw-up.
There's probably a counterfactual universe where he remained in his position, he learned a valuable lesson on keeping his mouth shut in public, and the company re-branded and recovered on a similar trajectory.
It wasn't, the company was going from strength to strength.
And whether "eventually it would flip" is another thing, and is irrelevant to this argument. Sure, every company will go down at some point.
That doesn't validate the idea put forward that this was some kind of "final piece" and the company was ready to flip anyway. There's absolutely no evidence for that. Your argument presupposes what it should prove.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
- The Sun Also Rises
I like to think I’d prefer Apple products over the competition and pay a premium for them even if I didn’t know Jobs or Ive, or watched the marketing videos - but I’m not entirely sure these days. I Tim Cook said Apple products were super cheap to produce, or Ive said he didn’t design any of them and had some intern do it, would sales tank?
A Rolex and a Timex will both tell you the time. An iPhone and a $129 Android will do mostly similar things. A Toyota Camry and a Porsche will both get you to work.
But practical utility and value aren't necessarily the most important thing.
Apple intuitively understood this, at a time when other computer companies didn't. Lots of people look at a Macbook and see an overpriced computer that costs a few hundred dollars more than a similarly equipped PC, albeit in a pretty case. But that's the point - lots of people want their computer to look good!
Apple products are relatively cheap to produce - and they make an enormous margin on their hardware. But it doesn't feel cheap. The boxes are substantial. The finishings are high quality. The user experience is taken care of. Other PC makers might have been much cheaper, but you notice that to do so, they've cut corners in places.
I don't think the lesson here is in what he said, but rather that he made his customers feel like idiots. Only a fool would believe that a ring for £1 has the level of quality and craftsmanship that you'd get with a £100 ring, but you don't want to feel like a dumbass for buying it. You don't go to McDonalds with expectations of buying a Michelin Star meal. You go there for something warm & tasty, that comes out quickly.
People making these decisions often claim their choices are made on purely rational grounds. But why then do large companies choose to spend so much money marketing things like Kubernetes, React, MongoDB, Red Hat Linux, etc? Surely these high-quality projects would stand their own in a marketplace of open code even without the money...
Some software companies like Oracle tell their stories primarily to corporate buyers, and developers sneer at them, thinking they're too smart to fall for that. Other companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have learned to tell their stories in ways that leave developers oblivious that they're being marketed to.
As a young lady my GF used to sell her handmade costume Jewelry on the street in New York. She said the key to selling was a card with a story. That was the difference between selling a brooch made of glass, brass and random bits held together with glue for $10-20 and not selling at all.
Things are different with utility items. I remember a retailer (my brain won't cough up the name, but every man over 40 would recognize them). He said his brand was, well made spiffy but not too spiffy men's clothes. His profit margin depended an a working age man being able to go in, buy a couple of shirts, pants, and a coat knowing he wouldn't look like a dork when he wore them to work.
I feel like that's Apple products too.
What story does one of the most expensive paintings of all time, Jackson Pollock #5, tell?
Care to elaborate what your distinction here is? I don't see it.
Comparing a windows laptop with highier specs with a macbook is like to compare a stupid blonde with big tits with a smart, classy and well tempered brunette. The cover is flashier and catch the attention on first sight but it's a burden to live with on a daily basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_O%27Leary_(businessman...
Which means that (i) they'll lookup the price and be upsold a package on Ryanair.com rather than finding the price and a different hotel deal on some other price comparison site and (ii) they'll still buy tickets from Ryanair.com at non-promotional rates when they're actually not the cheapest airline offering a viable route and time. And of course (iii) he can fill his flights without sharing revenues with online travel agents and other affiliates, though other low cost airlines without the reputation for taking things to extreme lengths manage that.
Although part of it's probably just his style. Not sure there was any strategy to his comments that "I don't care if no-one likes me. I'm not a cloud bunny or an aerosexual. I don't like aeroplanes. I never wanted to be a pilot like those other platoons of goons who populate the airline industry..."
I wonder if the aggressive upselling during the booking flow is part of this marketing too. If you really want the cheapest possible flight you will carefully decline all upsells and double-check the final bill for surcharges. This makes you feel you’ve shrewdly whittled the price down as far as possible.
Another way of looking at it is it just wears the customer down. If the booking flow were too smooth and didn’t include many points where the customer is forced to decline added luxuries, then you might be more likely to pause before confirming the transaction, and maybe open EasyJet’s site for a quick price comparison.
When you entrust care of people you love to a company, you tend to expect more than capitalism tuned to the extreme.
And before you ask, yes, that’s exactly what happened to a family member of mine. “Wheelchair assistance” never showed up.
So, no not worth it for the slight difference of price they offer.
One case that comes to mind is Ikea with this DIY approach. Is it the most convenient way to buy furniture? Not really given the work you need to do. Prof Moon argues that this paradoxically creates a stickiness to the brand because you have invested something (time and effort).
Another one is the "In-n-out" burger joint(Forgive me if I have gotten the name wrong). Apparently, it takes a full 15-20 minutes to get a burger here but it is thriving in-spite of this difficulty because people know they're not getting some frozen processed food.
[1]https://www.amazon.in/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme...
No passenger thinks he’s a lovable scamp or a shrewd businessman. They just buy the fare they can afford and justify, if it happens to be Ryanair then ... grin and bear it.
Ryanair don’t fly to London btw. Or Brussels.
Ryanair demand subsidies from local governments to fly to far-flung airports. They can hold these governments hostage, as often the airports fail if they stop their service. Of course, this could be seen as simply "bad management" by our local governments.
And to finish, though this is something that applies to all airlines : no VAT or "eco" tax, that the rest of us have to pay.
That image will keep them going right up until they have a fatal crash, at which point the press, the government, and victims’ attorneys will use every word he has ever said about being cheap to crucify him and the company. Given their volume of flights, a fatal crash is statistically likely to happen at some point. I would be very careful ever making such statements if I were in such an industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines#Accidents_a...
Southwest has one of the best, if not the best, safety records of all major air carriers.
True, but Southwest does not have a CEO that openly flaunts their being cheap either.
They've never had a major crash in almost 35 years.
I once won 15 hands of blackjack in a row, but then I lost a hand. Even the most expensive airlines eventually have fatal incidents, and it would be statistically improbable for Ryanair to not eventually have one as well. They may have an amazing safety record and stellar maintenance program, but the nature of flight is such that it is likely to eventually happen (perhaps through no fault of their own) if they are in business long enough. Whether “cheapness” will actually be a factor in that incident or not, people will take his prior statements and run with them.
All I was saying is that making such statements in a high-risk industry is not a fantastic idea, as those words may come back to bite him.
So your entire argument is people are dumb and they will make unwarranted associations. Brilliant
The guy is doing a cheap airline, not an unsafe one. He’s not a madman. He’s a ruthless business guy, and he knows a crash due to poor maintenance would end his business.
Because they hurl large, heavy, metal objects with people on them into the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, thousands of times per day. Historically, that activity has resulted in some small percentage of those flights not coming down safely. The math says that it is quite likely to happen over the course of enough flights.
I have flown Ryanair a few times, I’d rather not go than take them today though.
Has Ryanair flown more flights than all the domestic and international commercial jet flights in Australian history? Because there has never been a crash of a commercial jet here despite several near misses.
Safety culture and training has more of a bearing than statistics.
Ironically, I was extremely happy with everything after baggage drop-off. The flight itself was no worse than any other airline, in my eyes (I don't consider ads to meaningfully worsen a flight). The airport (Hahn, serving almost only Ryanair back then) was amazing, with super-friendly airport (not airline!) staff and short walking distances.
But their atrocious web site (AFAIK checking in required you to concatenate two random values and enter them in one form field, in the one working flow out of the 3-4 that were offered) and their outright, aggressive rudeness left a much stronger permanent impression than the (probably low) price, the two-hour bus ride to the middle-of-nowhere airport, or the flight itself.
At the very least they could've scrapped the boards and taken the tax writeoff.
> During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-russi...
People love to brag.
It was a good lesson.
Seeing things from her perspective is pretty interesting, to say the least: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq7Eh6JTKIg
John Oliver starts the discussion, but there is a Lewinsky interview which is very eye-opening for me.
This is the most interesting question, which the article doesn't answer.
Presumably he just didn't consider the possibility that the press would think it worth making a story out of.
Gerald Ratner made a wrong tradeoff in one case [too much openness and honesty for the audience that does NOT appreciate openness and honesty enough].
Some people are just like that.
He called his company's product "crap" at a 6,000-person event. That seemed pretty straight forward to me.
Maybe he did it because he's not very smart?
Ratner just got complacent and forgot he was on a hot mic.
Expecting leaders to be perfect 100% of the time will only result in leaders that are good at appearing perfect.
I'm curious - can you name a couple?
The only problem is him being in the jewelry business. People buy jewelry for vanity, of course they didn't like that. Sundar Pichai can call youtube $INSERT_SUB_SERVICE crap and discontinue that, you'll still watch youtube. If he's joking, he can call the entire company crap and nobody would stop using Google or Youtube.
These types of products succeed because of a shared delusion. Take fashion for instance. Everyone believes some clothes are more fashionable than others. The way you dress says a lot about you but why? It's simply because other people think it does. If the delusion runs into reality from the person hawking it, it can collapse quite quickly.
Psychology has a definition named the halo effect and it's very real. A person definitely gains advantages in society when they appear more attractive than less attractive. Naturally people associate good health with attractiveness and it's hard wired in us for finding a healthy mate compared to an unhealthy mate. Good choice of clothing for the frame of a person can enhance personal features and make a person look better than if wearing something less fitting. So there is some benefit & gain that can be made with understanding fashion of clothes as a real benefit. Is the advantage based on a delusion of a person being more healthy than another? Sure, but it isn't because people intentionally have a delusion about one shirt looking better than another.
We are more than hardwired to find the most capable mate. We're also hardwired to pick up social cues so if a large enough group of people believe something, we believe it too. If everyone you knew started wearing those MC Hammer pants tomorrow, how long would you hold out? If people suddenly and entirely stopped wearing ties with suits, would continue to wear the most unnecessary accessory ever? Why does everyone in tech dress so similarly?
Sure, nobody might expect much of a pair of earrings bought to wear at a party for a couple of pounds, but you'd be upset if you bought an engagement ring and the stone fell out.
Just takes one moment of too much edge to lose the gamble and end up throwing everything away.
Perhaps being edgy is the best way to force oneself into self reliance, and self reliance being the best way to hold ground against corruption... maybe the edgelessness of "adults" is just a sign of forfeit within a corrupt system.
The CEO could quite honestly say that their goals are consistency, speed, food safety, and affordability. Quality? I expect the honest response would be something along the lines of 1.) Millions of customers apparently like our product and 2.) We try to deliver the best quality product we can subject to our customers' other priorities. The CEO probably believes this to some degree or other. They're not trying to deliver a high-end steakhouse experience. McDonald's isn't even trying to deliver a Shake Shack experience--which maybe costs 2x (at least)?
I'm pretty sure nearly every McDonalds customer thinks the same way. They want quick, cheap, safely prepared food that tastes good enough to eat.
It's complete garbage compared to what the CEO is eating, and while everybody knows that, the CEO will never state it publicly. The story about Ratner is a direct example of what would happen.
IMHO this is how diamonds have proliferated for so long despite having minimal intrinsic value.
I had dealt with 'chocolate' diamonds for years, I currently have hundreds in my wood shop! My father works as a machinist, and brown, low-quality diamonds are their abrasive of choice for many jobs. They're (or rather, they were) super cheap because they were such low quality. I always swiped a handful when I visited him at work as a kid, because they made great pellets (they were exceptionally tiny and really hard) for my slingshot. I had a whole jug of them and just forgot about the things.
And now here we are.
The first shop she took it to offered a little under 10% of what it cost. She thought the shop was trying to scam her, so she went to a bunch of other shops, and they all offered less. So she went back to the first shop a couple of days later, and there was a different guy there who told her that the first guy was an idiot who overvalued the diamond. It was a piece of junk, and it was worth well under 10% of what it cost. The jeweler also pointed out, in detail, that the diamond itself was really shitty even by the standards of wedding rings. But because they already made that offer, they decided to honor it anyway just to avoid any drama. And so my mom sold a ring that cost her and my dad $30k for about $2600.
And I understand that's normal. Retailers mark new diamond rings up like crazy because that's how much people are willing to pay for a wedding ring, even if it's not what the stone is actually worth.
It's a glass bottle, it doesn't leak, it doesn't shatter when you pick it up. Apart from appearance, how much better quality could it usefully be?
If you insult someone with something that is clearly not true, they will brush it off.
But tell the truth they don't like and you will be hated more than anyone.
This is coming from someone who was frequently hated for saying the truth, because I come from a different culture and hadn't figured out how to navigate human interactions in the west. Especially when it comes to points that are related to people's identity formation (jewelry being a part of that)
Or as a favorite song says:
When the truth walks away
Everybody stays
Cause the truth about the world is that crime does pay
The 1980s British businessman who Musk most reminds me of is not Gerald Ratner but Robert Maxwell.
And also stealing hundreds of millions from pensions funds that lead to wholesale reform of the pensions industry in the UK
I say there should be more Ratners. Standardize his personality-type across all industries and political spheres.
Secondly, why did it have any effect? Who would change their practices because of this? It really rams home how deeply brands are integrated into our understanding of value.
How depressing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#%22Burning_Platfo...
It's harder for someone to blow them out of proportion or context when they are phrased that way, although people can still play the hypocrisy card.
I wonder, if there is a documented case of someone causing similar loss just for the reason of "having enough" with the pure intent of causing as much damage as possible or just for causing as much evil/pain as possible. In the sense of listening to his/hers dark triad temptation.
The original gaffe was selling people crap and not telling them it's crap.
“We work hard to keep our prices low by carefully selecting affordable materials while still providing stylish, attractive and fashionable products our customers love.”
...or:
“Our products are crap, the materials in them are crap, and by virtue of buying them, our customers assert that all they want is crap.”
Producing low cost items is not the issue, and naturally the quality is less with low cost items. People understood they weren’t buying high-grade platinum. It’s the expressed sentiment of the company leader was the gaffe.
Anybody that makes a giant investment decision based on a Musk tweet now is certifiable.
I think it was unlikely but just posing the question.
There are other stories of people giving away huge fortunes prehumously because they might think the money is better used elsewhere.
The phrase "high-powered" has never sat right with me. It sounds so hand-wavey.
Perspective.
The engineer in me takes things at face value: measured, empirical and framed in the right context. But I can understand the salesman approach to selling: you need to promote your product as the best.
This is especially true for the markets where valuations are pretty much "maxed out" and at all time highs. So the market runs on optimism and future expectations. The market will go up because I say it will go up! Nothing wrong with that perspective IMHO - insofar as talking about the markets.
> Have you ever heard of the “Ratner effect”?
> Well by the end of this post you will know what it means.
Wikipedia is probably the best bet.