Screwed: How It’s Done

Years ago, an olive company was experiencing financial difficulty. They needed to find a way to make more profit without raising their prices or lowering their standards.

So during a meeting, a clever sales manager had the idea: Let’s remove one olive from each jar. The customer will never know!! We can charge the same price, and for every 30 olives we take out of the jar, that creates a new jar by itself, at 100% profit.

The board got all excited, and they deployed their tactic at once. After 6 months, they noticed a definite increase in profit, but it wasn’t enough, so they revisited the idea. If they take another olive out of the jar, for a grand total of two, they could double their profit increase! They discussed it at length, and that clever sales manager said “We can keep doing this, but we have to give it time in between each olive we take out. Because if we take 10 olives out at once, people will notice and know they’re being screwed.”
“But if we take just one olive out, and let them sell for a year, people will acclimate and get used to the amount of olives they get. If we only remove one, people won’t notice or care.”

After several years, the olive jar had decreased in size by half, but the company was charging the same price (adjusted for inflation and the value of the dollar) as they were 15 years ago, only they were giving people half the amount of olives. They had effectively doubled their prices, slowly, without anyone knowing or caring.

This is symbolic of what’s happening in America. If we were to take ALL of our current laws and policies, and go back in time 40 years, and show everyone what’s coming down the road, BOTH political party’s would be extinct today.

This is how they take over our country. This is how they pass their laws and take our rights away. One at a time, slowly, let us get used to it, then take another away or pass another law. And we let them.

This is what happens when we don’t keep track of history and pay careful attention to what’s happening around us. And they know it. The question is, how much more are we going to let them get away with before we DO something about it??

Before you know it, we won’t have any olives left… and we’ll just be paying the same price for an empty jar.

2012-11-30