Why Business and Politics don’t Mix

Businesses should be like Viktor Bout, the infamous illegal arms dealer played by Nicholas Cage in The Lord of War.

During one conflict in the film, he was selling weapons to both sides. All he cared about was if the checks cleared or not.

A business should focus on doing one thing: selling its’ product at the highest quality possible at the lowest price possible. When a business starts catering to a particular skin color, or sexual orientation, or anything like that, to the exclusion of other groups, they light the fuse that will cause their own destruction.

Because when a business takes a stand on a contentious societal or political issue, half of their customer base will become upset and/or leave, because the company took that position. If the business doubles back to try and regain that half of their client base that just left, they find out the hard way that they’re not getting that base back, plus they lost the other side that initially supported them. So they lose everyone.

And this is a cascading failure. If you normally deliver and sell 1,000,000 units a month, and your screw-up costs you 300,000 less units sold a month, that first month you now have an excess of 300,000 units. Which means you have to buy more shelf space for the product in the stores you sell it in. If you don’t do that, then your warehouses will suddenly overflow. Next month it will be an extra 600,000 units. Because beer takes over a month to go from grains and water to canned alcohol, the supply chain will back up like a 15 car pileup for a good long while. And beer has a shelf life of only four months or so. After that date it must be destroyed and counts as spoilage and hurts the bottom line.

You also have to renege on the contracts with your suppliers. You have contracted to buy X amount of the things, which you now need less of. That hurts the farmers and other suppliers because they must now find a way to sell the product you promised to buy from them. Like this: Glass Bottling Plants Shut Down, Leaving 600 Employees Jobless Amid Bud Light Controversy. This is a contractor who supplied just the bottles to Bud Light. They still had to be shipped to the plants to get sanitized, filled and shipped off. The companies that ship your raw components to you and finished products to the store also take hits, as they now have to find new customers to keep the truckers employed.

So now you have pissed off (former) customers, overflowing supply chain backups and broken contracts. And it gets worse. You had to tank your own production facilities to a point below your current sales of 700,000 units so you can clear the overflow already out there. Laying off workers, shutting down plants and stuff like that. And this is not like a car where you can just turn a key and it shuts off, or starts up. To shut down or start up a plant is expensive, since you have to properly perform special maintenance on the equipment so it’s usable if/when you need it again. And it requires more special maintenance to start it up correctly, plus repairs of anything that broke during the nonoperation. The workers will also not wait around until you need them again. Many will move on to other jobs and careers.

And it’s way worse than what I’ve already gone over. The production plant is in the middle of the chain between raw components and the store that sells the product to you. Each store, warehouse, distribution center, producer and trucker in the chain will have troubles from this. Costs go up, sales go down, spoilage of product. Jobs lost lives ruined, there is no good outcome from this.

All because a Woke VP thought it would be a good idea to put the face of a “was-he” transgender person on their product.

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