Friday, January 15, 2010

Lessons corporations should learn from a juice vendor

There's an orange juice vendor at my "bus stop". (I saw "bus stop"
because it's not a bus that picks me up but a company car, that too
unofficially.) Very recently I started drinking a glass of freshly
squeezed orange juice from him while waiting for my pick up. Just once
in a while. Because of the rather unhygienic practices these street
vendors use while cleaning their glasses/soup bowls, I try not to
frequent them, and when I do, I try to arrive early before ... well
let me not describe the cleaning process because it's something I'm in
denial about. Anyway, today morning I showed up and asked him to make
me a glass of orange juice. He peeled 5 oranges and put them in the
juicer (squeezer) and squeezed out the juice. When he was done, the
glass was 90% full. I fully expected him just hand over the glass to
me, and I wouldn't even have complained. But he silently peeled
another orange and squeezed out enough to top off the glass! I was
really impressed.

Now, this is the proverbial "little guy", whose profit margin was
significantly cut into by that extra orange he had to peel. Let's
compare it with the "big guy" - the Subway that's in the food court
near our office. This is already in a food court in a mall, so the
prices are already jacked up. This Subway (for that matter any Subway
I've visited in India) NEVER fills up the soda/pop/cool drink
container to the brim. A few times I've popped the top and showed the
empty space in the container but they make some or the excuse not to
top it off. There's an Ovenfresh in the same mall that has the same
disgusting practice of not topping off the container.

It's shameful and pathetic that these corporations behave like this.
I'm sure it's because it's in India and some marketing a**hole did a
study to determine that Indians in these places don't complain about
losing out on a little bit of soda because they don't want to look
cheap by complaining, and it is now corporate policy to cheat the
customers. Another way in which the rich get richer and the poor get
poorer in India.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

marketers 1, consumers 0!

aa said...

nice! did u tip the guy :P

Unknown said...

nicee...buy him a shirt from me :)