Profiteers of the Open Market

Let’s kill all the lawyers, said Dick the Butcher in Henry VI (Part 2 since you ask). I have a better wheeze: Let’s marginalise all the f & b drones whose fantastical margins are the product of a rip-off culture - they are only even-handed in that they cheat their customers and suppliers with equal insolence…

“It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society.  When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime”.  ~Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

It was Saul Bellow who coined the phrase The Moronic Inferno to refer to the stupidity and venality of certain cultures. In business one encounters wide boys and girls, charlatans and an assortment of parasitical folk who believe implicitly in the sanctity of profit margins above all else. Business may be projected on models; but models still have to be applied to the real world, a world that includes human beings and the environment, a world which therefore defies simplistic mapping. What is inevitable is that certain decisions made by food and beverage managers can have a resounding critical impact. In the wine trade if you cheat your wine rep, you automatically cheat everyone who works for his/her company, and you cheat the growers who depend on that business.  All for the want of a few pennies.

Behaving in an aggressively negative fashion fosters bad will and the expectation that all future business will be transacted without trust and without notion of compromise.  No-one hired a food and beverage manager for their intelligence or empathy, but rather for their blank determination to achieve profit margins. What a narrow job description that dictates that price must forever precede quality. Commercial savvy can, by all means, have an ethical dimension, economic actions have moral as well as physical consequences. Those who cut corners, are meretricious and greedy and build their empire by threats and cheating usually reap their karmic reward. The following observation says it all:

If you attempt to beat a man down and to get his goods for less than a fair price, you are attempting to commit burglary, as much as though you broke into his shop to take the things without paying for them. There is cheating on both sides of the counter and generally less behind it than before it.
Henry Ward Beecher