Posted by
VBushmills on Friday, July 31, 2009 9:11:34 AM
In a former life I was head of product development in a Fortune 500 company.
It was a simple enough task. When Marketing said they wanted to create and sell a thing, it was my shop's job to sit down and determine how much it would cost to produce the item, and package it. Others would then tell us how much it cost to transport it out to distributors.
If there were no safety or environmental concerns, which required some extra legal review, and field testing, this process could be done as quickly as 10 days, complete and reported.
Then Marketing, after adding advertising costs, would decide what price/price point we needed to meet in order to be competitive with the product, and then the CEO would decide if that provided enough margin to justify the investment.
Sound simple?
In the current Cash for Clunkers project now offered by the government, with taxpayer dollars, through auto dealerships, it's obvious this sort of simple process wasn't done. Should've taken a week, tops.
It is also obvious they didn't even know how.
Karl Marx, meet the Keystone Cops.
Get ready for the train wreck.
Vassar