National Corporations and Magical Thinking

It's astonishing to me that large corporations ever evolved.  They really stink when it comes to efficiency, flexibility, and common sense.  For instance, the old Helena Cable TV was bought by Bresnan which was later bought by  Charter.  There are underground lines for Charter cable TV in the ground a stone's throw from my house.  But do you think I can get cable?  Nope.  Someday, if the cable company decides to expand 150 yards down the road to my place,  I can have cable.  I'm not sure what the deciding factor would be for this business expansion.  Does a committee back East somewhere sit down and consult with an astronomer to see if the moon is in the right phase?  Or does a decision to expand 150 yards have to do with the CEO getting his favorite Java at Starbucks in the morning?  This is a mystery.

I don't know much about cable TV, but I am reasonably certain that if the old cable TV company were still in operation, they would have run the cable to our house.  That business was run by people with reasoning ability.  They probably didn't spend their days gazing at computer generated sales models, but they possessed a modicum of common sense.  If they knew I wanted cable, they would have worked something out because they would see me as a person and a customer, not a statistic. A small company had the flexibility to make decisions on a case by case basis. They wouldn't crawl through a chain of command starting in my home town and ending up in Los Angeles to figure out whether or not to give me service.

Department stores that decide "one size fits all"  in the name of efficiency are another example of corporate stupidity.  A radio broadcast that mentioned J.C. Penny's had dubious sales reports didn't surprise me.  I used to buy a lot clothes at J.C. Penny's.  Then, the Corporate head decided to take the decision of what individual stores stocked out of the hands of the local store manager.  An employee told me that every store everywhere has to stock the same merchandise.  This decision decimated our local Penny's formerly excellent lingerie department, so I had to shop elsewhere.  Then came the spring when I saw the store stock numerous spring shades of men's sport coats in lilac, pink, yellow, and robin's egg blue.  I knew a huge sale on sport coats would be coming soon.  Sport coats in those shades may have been real sellers in Baltimore, but anyone who lived in my hometown would tell you that you couldn't give those jackets away here.  They had the sale, but the men shopping in my town decided to save 100% when it came to those jackets.

Call me a bird brain, but shipping merchandise thousands of miles only to ship it back again when it doesn't sell, doesn't seem like a way to make money.

It seems like when businesses get big, they lose contact with the the basic principles of commerce. Most people don't buy what they don't want, no matter how catchy the ad campaign. Big businesses kid themselves into thinking that what is easy for the business is the best course, and that the business can magically get customers to buy whatever the store decides to sell.  Earth to corporations:  we may live in the sticks, but we don't buy stuff we don't want.