Are A Priceless Treasure
A lot of people care about others. We just don’t hear about them often because for the most part the motivation to help others is a selfless act and no reward is sought beyond knowing that you were useful in a good way. In general, altruistic good deeds are not recorded.
Winging their way home
We may question the whole concept of good and bad, but that is not the topic today.
I have been experiencing the inconvenience of corporate management of goods and services. Two of my favorite food companies and my favorite computer company have been sabotaged by ill advised profit motivated management decisions recently.
Stunningly beautiful driveway rose
At the local level, the northstate organic and healthy food distributer has been replaced by a corporate entity (Unified Grocers) another profits first and above all other considerations money management business. This means they don’t see enough profit in continuing to bring Straus Family Creamery products all the way from the town of Marshall on Tomales Bay to Redding. So they crossed them off their list.
View from the top of the stairs
In case you didn’t know, the whole purpose of incorporating a business is to cheat on federal, state and local taxes. It also allows them immunity from prosecution when they break the law.
How do they get away with it?
Most people don’t pay attention to what is being legislated in our towns, states, and the U.S. legislature. This inattention is what has allowed the corporations, their lobbies, and their hand picked ‘elected’ lawmakers of the last 30 years to undo most of the laws that protected us from their predatory business practices.
Passions unfurled
Okay, enough of the civics lesson, let’s get to the important stuff; Breakfast cereal.
How to kill a business based on a quality product. Nature’s Path began as an organic alternative to the sugary, over processed junk that Kellogg's and General Mills call breakfast cereal. A few years ago it seems that a marketing company salesperson convinced the Nature’s Path’s family that they could reach many more breakfast tables with their product if they signed up with a marketing company. This led them to a corporate management profit based business model.
Friday sunset
They now have dozens of sugary Nature’s Path organic GMO free cereals, snack bars, waffles, single serving sugary flavored oatmeal and other products just like the ones the big corporations sell. Heritage Flakes and Flax Plus (the last 2 of the cereals that were my reason for eating Nature’s Path) are now tasteless cardboard textured toasted flakes coated with extra sugars.
I wrote to Nature’s Path a couple of years ago when they added barley malt extract to Heritage Flakes. I asked them why they would add sugar to organic cereal. They wrote back, “Because it tastes better”. This year they began sugar coating Flax Plus.
Crepe
I have nothing against sugar. I like sugar. I don’t like it in everything I eat or drink. Too much sugar is detrimental to any living thing, including humans. Fake sugars are deadlier than real sugar. Like GMO foods, fake sugar lacks the full compliment of ingredients that provide nutritious compounds with a natural balance of acids plus other mineral and microbial essentials. (Just recently beekeepers found they were killing bees by feeding them HFCS instead of hive honey)
We now come to another way in which the corporate profit model diminishes the value of products and services. When they buy out, or take over another company it is not for what the company makes or does; They want the “Brand”.
Beauty will find a way
Once they have that, they can fire the employees, close the manufacturing facility, and paste the “Brand” on a lesser quality product and people will buy the crap long enough for the corporation to show a big profit and sell the broken company for more than they paid. Yay money!
And so it is with Apple. If they continue degrading the user experience, In a few years they will no longer need to manufacture or design anything. Instead someone will be sticking the Apple brand on something inferior and selling it to those who haven’t been paying attention.
Why do I take the time to explain this? Because I care.
Today’s Video;
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