A man who destroyed his multimillion dollar company in 10 seconds (2018)
I&#x27;ve always been amazed at how important it appears to be to lie about selling crap. I find that invariably, businesses who compete on price make it iff they <i>say</i> it&#x27;s good stuff, even if everybody knows it isn&#x27;t.<p>Eg Holland has a number of cheap shoe chains. Schoenenreus and Scapino both breathe an air of cheapness, and one went bust and the other is struggling bad. Their direct competitor Van Haren sells exactly equally crappy shoes, and everybody knows it, but they are thriving, simply because the store feels like a proper high quality shoe store.<p>Or take ALDI, which competes on price and nothing else. In every country I visited has the words &quot;the ALDI principle: low prices, high quality&quot; printed on every storefront and on every <i>page</i> of their paper promo flyers. Granted, little of what they sell is &quot;total crap&quot;, but little is of truly high quality either. Their bread goes stale faster and their coffee is bitter. This surprises nobody.<p>It appears to me that this weird dichotomy is the only way to successfully compete on price. Make it perfectly obvious that you&#x27;re cheap and of mediocre quality at best, while loudly shouting that the quality is high. Nobody believes you, but nobody wants to buy from you if you&#x27;re honest about what you&#x27;re selling.<p>I find this surprising because blatant lies don&#x27;t generally work that well in the long term, so why do they here? I generally <i>hate</i> dishonest messaging. Why don&#x27;t I mind here? I buy ALDI and Van Haren all the time.