Here's one I started yesterday that got deleted within minutes. The title was "Conspiracy Theory".
What would you do if you ran a cigar auction website and your boss told you it wasn’t profitable enough? Well, you’d probably try to find ways to make it more so. You would have 2 approaches— cut expenses and raise revenue.
You might start cutting expenses by reducing personnel in the customer service department. Sure, there would be some complaints on your public forum, but most customers would assume it was a temporary situation and keep supporting you. Besides, look at all that money you would save.
You could also cut expenses by dissolving your in-house shipping department and transferring orders to the parent company’s shipping department. There would undoubtedly be complaints due to delays and errors, but you would have rid yourself of those salaries.
There would be some deadwood that needed pruning in the lot creating department. There might be a few more errors in the descriptions and pictures, but nobody would be able to contact customer service to complain when they got a candle instead of a box of cigars.
Raising revenue would be a bit more tricky. People are only going to bid so much. Or are they? Your IT contractor could be tasked to come up with a “bid bot” that would enforce a predetermined reserve on each lot. If actual bidders outbid the bot that would increase revenues. If they failed to outbid the bot that would reduce costs. Win/win! The best part is that no one would ever know. Unless, of course, that IT contractor you hired made a programming mistake and based the bot bid on the “bid to win” instead of the “current bid”. That double jump from the last legitimate bid would be obvious. But you would certainly test for that before you put it online, right?
It’s just an idle theory. I’m sure there’s really no truth to it. They wouldn’t do that to us.
