Ebay Fees Are Insane

Earle, it is the "this quarter" syndrome. Corporations don't REALLY look at the long term.

For example; I worked for a rather large retail Corporation in..lets just call it Upper Management. When we were a start up company we had this refund policy that you could refund anything that you bought for any reason. Receipt or no receipt. We over took our competitors and soon began playing with the big boys. In a 5 year period we went from a regional company with 31 locations in two states to 150 locations in seven states. We soon posted our first Billion dollar sales year around 1982ish. Times were euphoric. We could do no wrong. But we got bought out by another corporation and became part of a 'group'.

The first thing to go, other than the retail unions, benefits, and wage structure was our refund policy. Some bright boy figured out that if we required a receipt and then made all refunds by check, instead of cash ( which we almost never sent out) that we would save one or two million of dollars a year.

The next year same store profits were down by almost eleven percent. As you can imagine panic set in with our new bosses..cuz you KNOW that they KNEW it was not their fault! Commitees and focus groups were formed ( we did not actually call them focus groups back then, but you get the message). And after almost a year of polling and study concluded that our, essentially non-existent, refund policy was driving our customers to our competitors in droves. We re-introduced our policy and reversed the trend. When we were "safe' they changed the policy to something in between. Meaning they actually sent the check....but waited 90 days. Dooooooooooown went our numbers again....and for several years we went on that roller coaster depending on what our numbers were for that quarter.

We were still profitable but our growth and total revenues became stunted while we were under the umbrella of the group. At one point we became independent again, and under old leadership we doubled in size in another five years. And then came under another Corporations grasp and the whole thing started over again.

You would not believe how stupid the leadership in Corporate America can be. How just the mere ownership of an MBA can make a person sure and certain that they know all there is to know about running the company. Or the arrogance and hubris of a 25 year old Exec who never paid his own bills ever; who thought he understood how blue collar Americans felt.

I well remember one meeting where the CEO flew in from the Bahamas in his private 737, and told us that because of falling revenues in Q4 that the employees would have to take a pay cut. I remember his speech went something like this "Our employees are loyal and they know that they have to make sacrifices for the good of the company". Lol...our controller pointed out that if the CEO simply flew commercial Airlines that it would save the company millions of dollars and year and no pay cuts would be necessary...........yeah.....needless to say the CEO never stopped flying his toy and the controller lost his job.

But that is my parable of CA.