I used to be an avid baseball fan. It’s how I got into this business. I wanted to be a sportswriter.
I scoured every box score every morning from April through September and then devoured all the winter news on trades and retirements.
But increasingly, those winter stories were replaced by different stories: players on steroids; players arrested for domestic abuse; players arrested for bar fights, or DUIs, or gun possession or cocaine-possession; players whining because their 10-gazillion-dollar contract just isn’t enough anymore.
I’m not a sportswriter, of course. Now I write about retailing and brands. But the disillusionment seems to have followed me to this side of the street.
We used to rave about how Walmart does what it does better than anyone else. Now we read that Walmart has evidently been bribing Mexican officials to let certain regulatory requirements slide. The bribes bought reductions in environment impact fees and fast-tracked zoning approvals. The investigation is even linked to Eduardo Castro-Wright, then ceo of Walmart de Mexico (now vice chairman in the U.S.).
We used to rave about how Best Buy kept reinventing itself to stay atop the competitive consumer electronics world. Now, as Best Buy’s performance plummets, we learn that ceo Brian Dunne resigned amidst an investigation into “personal conduct” issues. Of course, that’s almost a dog-bites-man story anymore these days. But Best Buy had always been known for sound, keep-your-eye-on-the-ball management. It’s in Minnesota, after all. Isn’t that “the real America”?
We used to rave about how Apple simply reinvented the world. Then we learned about the company’s heinously brutal worker conditions in China. Sort of makes article headlines like “How to Succeed in China Like Apple” seem laughable now – but also sad.
And now another shoe has dropped. Apple has been found to be using clever ruses to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes, using offices in foreign countries with low tax bases and even creating small U.S. offices outside of California with low corporate tax rates (the corporate tax rate in Nevada is zero) to collect and invest its profits.
It’s all apparently legal, as of now. But it’s certainly not commendable – especially given all our conversations these days about those destructive “tax loopholes.”
I’m no innocent juvenile anymore, of course. None of these is a “say it ain’t so” moment for me. But the collection of moments creates a profile of greed, dishonesty and, since they were all caught, a certain Three Stooges kind of bumbling.
Over the last several years, I’ve been told repeatedly that store builders’ attempts to be green create an effective marketing campaign because shoppers really do notice, and respect the retailers who do them. I wonder how much they’re respecting these days.