Whereas the above is speculation that the lottery economy is operating at a loss in some areas, there are other areas we don't have to speculate about so much. In 1984, I started working for Frito-Lay, which was and is a division of PepsiCo. The company was in the process of making a large capital investment in packaging machines. The old machines put chips into the bags sequentially until the bag exceeded its net weight. Therefore, a customer was going to get some fraction of a chip over the net weight printed on the bag. It might amount to slightly over a gram of extra weight on average. The new machines had multiple heads, somewhere around 14, and the combination of 4, 5, or 6 heads that exceeded the net weight by the least amount was used to fill the bag. That meant that the overage was essentially going to disappear. This one plant was probably filling around 200 million bags per year and by saving a gram per bag, that was going to save around 440,000 pounds of product that the customers were previously getting in overage. Therefore, the justification in making the purchase was based on the savings of product. It was simply a transfer of value from the customer to the company, so the project was a complete waste of resources when the overall economy is considered, but a great use of resources for the company. The company had somewhere around 40 plants and this project was rolled out company-wide. It was probably the largest capital investment the company made in plant upgrades during the 3 years I was there. In today's dollars, a good guess might be $400 million was spent on this project company-wide.Higgenbotham wrote: ↑Sun Jan 01, 2023 12:35 amMost everyone knows that there are some youtube users who have made videos, hit it big with millions of views and made a lot of money. It can't be said with certainty how many people are trying to replicate that or how many hours they are putting into trying, but let's assume for the sake of argument that for every one winner who hits the lottery and makes $2 million per year there are a thousand who try each year and don't. And let's say those thousand put in an average of $10,000 in productive effort before they realize it isn't going to work. That would mean that while $2 million per year comes out of the magical youtube cornucopia, $10 million worth of productive effort gets wasted trying. That's a net loss for those trying to cash in on the lottery economy.
As these machines were started up, quality control was finding a lot of underweights. Their procedure was to tare an empty bag off each line at the beginning of the shift, then go from line to line spot checking product. When underweights were found, entire skids were put on hold and, from time to time, the floor was packed with skids on hold. The procedure for skids put on hold was to open any bags that were shown to be underweight and repackage the product. When underweights continued to turn up, the suggested remedy was more training. Since the problem was mostly not lack of training or understanding on the part of machine operators, underweights continued to be found. There were about 40 management people in the plant in various capacities, but after a few days no solution had been found. That was the situation I walked into as a new supervisor on the night shift in quality control. I think anybody reading this would see the obvious thing to check. Since the overage was now in the range of small fractions of a gram, it would have made sense to tare another bag, as the rollstock could be varying in thickness enough to cause apparent underweights. That turned out to be the case about 70% of the time underweights were found.
I didn't know it in the first few days on the job or even the first few weeks, but the man who ran the night shift came in drunk many nights and would sit on the toilet in the third stall of the men's bathroom. When one of the supervisors would see his feet under the stall door, he would put the word out by saying "Stall three!" as he walked by another supervisor and the word would spread. I wasn't privy to that initially. One time a supervisor made a mark on the toilet paper to see if he was using any and the mark was still there when he left the stall.
In those early days, I continued to solve technical problems in the plant, mostly small ones but a few other big ones and got a reputation for that. My boss was on days and heard some of this. He warned me that would be used against me, as the stereotype used against people who had technical skills and actually solved problems was that they didn't have the "people skills" needed to do their jobs in a labor intensive business that had a lot of personnel issues. He warned me that I had two enemies in the plant who were going to use this tactic to try to get rid of me. The first was his boss and the second was the drunk who ran the night shift. I had already been warned by his boss that I was replacing a man who had been fired for not having the right "people skills" and the man who ran the other shift would have been fired but had quit before he could fire him.
After the warning from my boss, I had to lead a work group meeting on the night shift which the drunk attended. My boss told me the drunk had given feedback to the managers on the day shift, telling them I had been nervous and ineffective in leading the meeting. Meanwhile, my boss told me that his boss had stated I was not efficient because I was working too many hours (if I had worked "too few" of course he would have said I was not dedicated). My Dad was a different generation than parents today and he had already told me in so many words that losers can't quit jobs and come home to live in their parents' house, so I knew it was up to me to come up with a way to deal with this on my own.
It had become obvious to me that work at a large corporation had less to do with actual work and a more to do with polishing your image. Also, after hearing that the manufacturing VP from corporate was due in shortly to hear presentations from front line supervisors, it also became obvious that the drunk had been prepping for that event by setting an expectation in people's minds that I would be nervous when giving my presentation. That was a reasonable tactic, as there was a lot riding on those presentations for anyone who wanted to get a promotion or maybe just not get fired, as the company did fire a lot of front line staff. So I turned my attention to how to give the presentation in such a way to discredit him. I decided that I would casually step away from the podium while giving it and talk in a way that appeared extemporaneous instead of reading exclusively from notes, which is what everyone else did, and they appeared nervous when doing so. That seemed to work well and the feedback was positive, putting an end to that round of bullshit.
Based on the above specific example,
When things are going well for an organization such as a corporation that is making billions of dollars in yearly profit, that organization as a whole will not rise to its peak level of performance. Instead, its members will put their best efforts toward getting the greatest amount of the bounty provided by the organization for themselves with no concern about the consequences of this behavior. In the example cited above, if chaos on the packaging floor helps a certain individual get the greatest amount of bounty, that individual will typically not attempt to solve the problem and will opt to let the chaos continue to their benefit. If a specific individual doesn't have that focus, that individual will be forced by others to reorient to behaviors consistent with that focus in order to remain as a member of the organization.
Further,
Only when a crisis occurs that threatens the existence of the organization, it is possible to reverse this orientation because it is only at that point that each individual member of the group can realize that if the organization ceases to exist, nobody will be getting anything. With a corporation, that is getting more and more difficult to identify. In the past, it was possible to identify that a corporation was in a crisis that threatened its existence when it started showing losses that would predict the doors would be closed at such and such a time. Now that the Federal Reserve is providing bailouts, it is impossible for anyone to know whether the corporation they work for really is in a crisis. Therefore, even if a real crisis is in the making, informed individuals may not alter their behavior in time thinking that yet another Federal Reserve bailout is likely in the cards.
