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> Again, I was a Juul employee - I do not believe Juul consciously or explicitly wanted youths to use Juul.

Juul is not conscious and cannot want anything.

I think it's pretty clear that there were some Juul employees who wanted children to use their company's product. Company representatives did not just wander into schools by chance; someone reached out and struck that deal. Clearly not you, and maybe no one on your team, but certainly someone.

And incompetent or not, Juul the organization is responsible for its actions.

It seems like pclark is suggesting Juul's attempts to market to kids were so incompetent and doomed to failure that they arguably don't even qualify as worthy of serious moral condemnation. Like if I attempted to kill you with a wet noodle believing it was a knife.

Not sure I buy this but it's amusing at the very least.

I think it’s more like: Random people were being hired by random VPs to do random things.

Which, sadly, will get you dinged by regulators, since this is the one of the main reasons regulators exist.

Um, is that sad? (Did you mean the sad part sarcastically?)

I sure hope so!

> Juul is not conscious and cannot want anything.

Whether or not it is conscious and whether or not it wants anything is fundamentally unprovable (even for you, assuming you are human) and thus this statement can only be founded on nothing but faith and assumptions.

In a practical sense Juul has legal personhood and can be seen to respond to impulses and plan. It is reasonable to treat it as an entity: if it is harmful it must be punished. If elements of it are exceptionally harmful, they must be punished extra (just as we do for cancer). None of that has anything at all to do with whether or not it has consciousness or wants things.

> I think it's pretty clear that there were some Juul employees who wanted children to use their company's product. Company representatives did not just wander into schools by chance; someone reached out and struck that deal. Clearly not you, and maybe no one on your team, but certainly someone.

Straw man. Here's an equally clear (ie, not clear) steel man: someone wanted to get brand equity with adults from telling kids not to vape.

They were paying $10,000 for the ability to talk to students with no teachers present?

I know GP said Juul employees were largely incompetent, but I just can't believe anyone was that stupid. If the goal is "to get brand equity with adults", you want the adults to be watching.

what school allows for anyone to sit with kids at the school unsupervised? I feel like people keep glossing over that.

Juul arranged to be there, but I find ithard to believe they did anything to explicitly prevent other adults from being in the room. No one at the school had enough common sense to be like "someone should chaperon this" ?

I kind of agree that it was probably entirely inconsequential to the popularity of juul though.

> Juul is not conscious and cannot want anything.

> And incompetent or not, Juul the organization is responsible for its actions.

Don’t those two conflict?

No. Companies are not conscious beings, but they are monetarily liable for their actions.

Your rationalizing that it was Juul's "incompetence" that led them to market to children comes off as nonsense. A perfect example of the "banality of evil" - it's easy to blame incompetence because it's harder to come to terms that seemingly good people barely batted an eye while getting an entire generation hooked on nicotine.

"I do not believe Juul consciously or explicitly wanted youths to use Juul."

I do, and their actions prove it. Individuals who worked at the company were simply reacting to the obvious economic incentives of "growth at all costs", and it was clear they were allowed to market using whatever means necessary.

You keep saying Juul was "incompetent" and "stupid" when it's neither. Marketing to children is a very calculated and well-tested means of peddling drugs. A better way to describe it is malicious, diabolical or downright evil.

Not just drugs- any kind of deviant culture really.

In this case it's drugs.

What are you implying here?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

> People spend a lot of time discussing the chronic youth issues but the reality is that Juul never wanted to sell to youths or anything of the sort — they were just _so_ incompetent at operations that they couldn't do anything.

> I do not believe Juul consciously or explicitly wanted youths to use Juul

This... is not incompetence or a side effect.

They fucking paid schools to tell kids that Vaping was safe. You can try to say "oh, they didn't realllllly want to sell to kids, they just weren't good at their job".

They gave ad agencies specific briefs saying that their target market for a campaign was '13-17 year olds'.

"They didn't realllllly want to sell to kids".

No. They knew exactly what the fuck they were doing.

I think what parent is saying is that you get a lot of outcomes when you have unmonitored VPs with a few million dollars of budget.

Regardless of what the corporate intent is. Inasmuch as there can be one in such a company.

When your corporate intent is not to fire VPs who go "off the reservation", but continue to employ, reward them with bonuses, there's a plausible argument that you're absolutely defining that as your corporate intent.

Per parent's description, there was no reservation. It was just everyone doing their own thing.

And having worked at a few companies that suddenly fell into orders-of-magnitude more revenue, it rings plausible.

When the money hose is spewing, nobody spends much time asking "Why?" anyone is doing anything, as long as it's just shy (or sometime inclusive) of embezzlement.

Corporate intent is the intent of the VPs in aggregate.

I am confused. They didn't want children to vape but they were in schools saying it is safe? This makes zero sense and I am not sure how your reply is coherent. Does the Sinclair quote apply here?

It could probably go something like this:

Juul the brand does not want to market to kids because laws, FDA, etc. Some incompetent VP of marketing wanted to quickly boost numbers, ethics be damned.

I don't mean to stick up for Juul, but it's not out of the realm of possibility considering how incompetent the company sounds from the above.

Hahahaha you think they had goals?? :)

If I had to guess it would have been some nebulous 'youth prevention' team thinking it was wise to go into schools and explain why cigarettes were bad and vaping wasn't encouraged yada yada.

Inexcusable but Juul was a quintessential "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" company. (I don't expect people to believe me on that.)

Fantastic commentary - thank you.

Now I am waiting for the conspiracy theorists to twist your words and imply that you must be a company shill.

Or to tell you how evil you were working, and how they only produce using ethically sourced curly braces, with fairtrade electricity, an organic compiler, on their own hand-carved recyclable wooden laptop.

Lol Juul's meta strategy of shilling themselves by painting themselves as painfully incompetent, it's genius

>"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

and that for the execs and the likes means "never do malice as malice, do it under the guise of stupidity". The VW diesel-gate comes to mind - they skillfully spun it like it wasn't VW malice as a company, and instead like it was some rogue employees.

May be you believe that you're saying. Yet giving the MBA types in charge of the company, my bet would be that they intentionally targeted youth while blaming it on whatever incompetence and chaos you're describing.

But then why would they intentionally target a group who has little to no money and can’t legally buy their product? And somewhere juuls advertising style got twisted and any ad not showing an adult (read over 30) is targeting youths?

"Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."

Not OP but...

> This makes zero sense and I am not sure how your reply is coherent.

> * I cannot reiterate enough just how incompetent Juul was in 2017.

Pretty sure that's how they think the reply is coherent. My understanding so far is that someone in some decision-making capacity at Juul decided that it would be a good idea for company representatives to go to schools with the intent to tell students that vaping is bad mm'kay (but it's totally not as bad as cigarettes). This was done specifically because they did not want to sell to youths.

I've worked around other people long enough for that to be appropriately stupid. Yes, it makes zero sense, and that is, in part, why it's so believable.

And when they told their ad agency that their target market for a campaign was "13-17 year olds"?

When did this happen? Got a link?

Consider from the lens that the OP states that JUUL employees were incompetent and also that he was a former JUUL employee.

Vaping was a "meme" largely BECAUSE of JUUL -- who else was even a market player?

Juuls are not the most popular device by far. Most vaper I know use some custom or larger device. I’ve seen maybe 2 juuls in the wild and as a juul user myself as well as a heavy traveler, if they were the most popular vape then finding the pods would be easy yet many trips i switch to vuse as it’s easier to find their pods.

I think that JUUL was the only real market player for some time.

In nyc it’s all I saw.

If I grant your premise that Juul's actions were the result of incompetence then I still don't think it's much better.

Accidentally promoting their product to minors has 1) The same impact as if it was done on purpose and 2) demonstrates criminal negligence.

I also don't regard Altria's operational professionalism and discipline as a net positive in this situation. A company with a historical track record of deliberately marketing to children and a current track record of continuing to do so (IQOS) is no improvement merely because they control headcount and limit vanity projects.

"We just wanted to offer candy flavored highly addictive vaporizers to the market in every store that young people shop at. We weren't TRYING to get young people addicted!"

Do you believe that adults don’t like these flavors as well? Do you not remember the campaigns by adults when they banned flavored cartridges?

Oh wow drug addicts don't want to quit? Shocking.

Note that a Corporation can do things without anyone who works there wanting to do those things. No employee of Union Carbide wanted to poision 2.5k people in Bhopal [1]. Yet it still happened, and there is no question about who caused the disaster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

Thanks for the clarification. I disagree with your basic point, but I didn't work there and your follow up did help me understand your opinion better.