Huh? Did anyone else's head just ratchet a full 360 reading that? Cost is a function of price paid.
I've worked in retail and your account of mountains of items being thrown away is complete fiction and a truly poor example of trying to compare corporate waste to that of government unless your previous employer does things vastly different than most other big box operations. Many defective and over-run items which are returned wind up being reconditioned and/or re-sold via discount outlets like Big Lots or internet retailers. But if you care to make that comparison based on broken and defective retail goods, then do the same on a material basis and the government still manages to mismanage and waste assets far worse than the corporate world because, again, they are accountable to no one for their waste.
Corporations are necessarily run far more efficiently than government, again because they are accountable to shareholders to minimize waste and duplication of services by needing to maintain profitability objectives (I'm sorry, I mean greed objectives for those who are free-market challenged). They can also fire people who don't perform their job duties as expected a whole lot easier than government can (or will).
That's just silly. Lets take just one industry which I am familiar with. Office Supplies. If you want I could choose the Oil industry, the medical industry, newspapers or groceries. They all are hopeless wasters.
Big box locations in Tulsa numbers about a dozen. They are open 360 days a year. Everyday we threw away stock that was returned, damaged in shipment, slow moving stock that was not part of a return w/credit agreement, etc. Enough that we had to contract with a company for a huge trash compactor to be regularly hauled off. One chair per day that needed a part ordered. That may have needed a wheel replaced. That could have been marked down and sold as is. Times 360, times 12. That's 4320 chairs per day just in Tulsa. That's just one item from one department. At an average margin of 40% if the chair cost $100 that is $172,000. No return agreement on most of them. That doesn't count the opportunity loss of having that money used in more productive pursuits. The real loss for them is $172,000 plus at least the cost of borrowing $262,000 at market rates. And believe me I am being conservative with those figures. They could contract with an independent to buy them, repair them and resell them, like companies did back in the 1980's but they are scared of being underpriced in their own market.
More importantly, there is no mechanism, no loss prevention protocol within the company to do so. If corporate doesn't see it, it doesn't exist. Is any of this sounding familiar? Sort of like governmental bs? Well, then you think they may outfit each store with a small repair facility and/or an employee so they could repair and resell themselves. Wrong. That would mean additional lost $per foot and labor expended. No patience for that. You really think the stockholders know they are throwing away nearly a quarter million $ of their money just in one department? No. If everyone does it then its not noticeable to them.
Then add in the partial theft (remainder thrown away), the timely materials like calendars and planners, the broken plastics, store merchandising fixtures, displays and other generally lazy, short sighted business decisions like belief in "just in time" restocking systems or overdependence on digital solutions and you see some really incompetent, lazy businessmen who succeed on the backs of employees. McDonalds in college taught me one thing, its the front counter guy who IS the company.
ONE more example cause I doubt I'll ever change you guys perception. Because mainly I think you only view government waste as a result of social costs and labor. I ask this of Recyclemike: How is the recycling of these new mercury laden lightbulbs being handled? Did the industry accompany their release with recycling centers located within the point of sale locations? Or did they niftily shuffle off that responsibility with printed instructions to "please recycle safely at your local recycling center" so that you and other taxpayers would pay for that? Did they include the cost of that potentially dangerous product in the pricing of the product? How much would that be?
OR did they do what bottlers did when they stopped using glass containers that you could recycle for $.05 cents apiece in favor of plastic that ended up in rivers, lakes, oceans and landfills at no cost whatsoever? Just curious.
Talk about waste and you have no one who outpaces industry. If you're talking incompetence, note that most politicians came from the business world. They take those competencies with them.
