webofevil | (no subject)

Many years ago a friend of mine was doing some marketing work for Coke. Despite already being the World’s Favourite Drink, its ambition is almost Bond-villain sinister. When a family sees that the milk in its fridge is shortly to run out, it has observed, they make sure to replace it before they ever go without. The Coca-Cola Company genuinely will not be satisfied until you do the same with Coke, and its executives are childishly baffled that most people (bar the Beckhams) don’t already. ^[1]

I was reminded of this last week when talking to someone who had overheard a conversation. (This, obviously, is a chain of attribution that I would not expect to stand up in a court of law but, as my source had no reason to lie, for now it’s good enough for the court of me.) He had heard two senior managers from Oxfam talking about their expanding bookshop chain—that’s the bookshops that don’t pay for their stock, pay little or no rates and secure high-street locations—and one of them said cheerfully that it was Oxfam’s ambition to put every other second-hand bookshop out of business. With its inbuilt advantages over actual booksellers, it just could.

Were that ever to happen, it would lead to the kind of monopoly that makes the OFT start sniffing around—but what the hell are charity execs doing thinking like Coke in the first place?

^[1] “If you received your fructose only from vegetables and fruits (where it originates) as most people did a century ago, you’d consume about 15 grams per day—a far cry from the 73 grams per day the typical adolescent gets from sweetened drinks.” [Huffington Post]

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How about telling Coke to bring down the pH a bit? I want a fizzy drink that isn't acidic.

Hang on, Coke would probably go too far and solve the morning tea habit plus allergies problems as well by inventing "Coke milk"....

SHhhhhhhh.

Is it Oxfam that have centralised their book collection to make sure that nothing goes on the shelf for less than market rates?

Which seems to miss the point of why anyone goes into a charity shop.

Charity Execs think like Coke (or model their behaviour and aims on those of Cokish people) because they believe it's their duty to maximise income for the charity. Oxfam doesn't exist to sell books cheaply or to look after the book market in general - it exists to alleviate the effects of famine and poverty in the developing world. If selling books in a cutthroat sort of way to people in the UK that can afford to buy them and do so willingly helps Oxfam to get money to do good works then, the argument goes, it's surely worth it.

I think sometimes the perception of charities is that they should be extra good in all directions, where actually what they're required to do is do the best they can toward their aims. Hence loads of charities have rubbish employment practices, are badly run, are incredibly opportunistic in terms of mergers and contract grabbing etc and get away with it for along time because a.) they operate under the invisible blanket of nice and b.) in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter all that much as long as they're delivering - just as with business, public sector agencies etc.

Shareholder thinking is endemic in society. Because no one remembers why they're doing anything, they're just stumbling and hoping they're stumbling upwards.

Actually a lot of them are just like that. I did voluntary work at the offices of *big charity you would have heard of* and they had an entire floor of people with brand new Macs snooping on other charities to see how well their fundraising was going and if they could steal the ideas.

I hate the Oxfam book shops. Stupidly overpriced and never anything particularly interesting anyway.