I'm living a perfect example of corporate greed. 6 billion dollar Megacorp. They tie the VP of purchasing's bonus directly into how much cost savings he can get from vendors even though the company hasn't reduced their sell prices nor have they given their employees wage increases. In fact, they've been laying off long term employees right before they're eligible for their well earned pensions at a record pace.
So they come to us every year and demand a 5% price reduction. Most years we can accommodate them but in 2014 we couldn't. The dude gets pissed and instructs his team to coerce our partner to cut us completely out. 6 billion dollar company gets their 5% discount, our partner is able to increase their profits, and my company loses 90% of our sales overnight.
33 employees lose their long standing jobs, including my wife. I had to let go a guy who I hired 17 years ago and who'd become a close friend. We lose our building, and our reputation (because the mega corp and our partner manufactured a bogus payment dispute to cover their subterfuge).
The worst part? Megacorp was just sold for 8 billion dollars and it was disclosed that they'd achieved record profits for the last 10 quarters.
TLDR: Modern day free market capitalism is being used and abused to epic proportions to benefit the top percentile while doing squat for everyone else - and in our case, it got us kicked into the gutter.
You go Goofle!
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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
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