Post No.: 0638
Fluffystealthkitten says:
You’d probably assume that all businesses, at the forefront of their minds, care deeply about their customers staying healthy and alive for as long as possible so that they’ll consume more of their products through repeat custom during their total lifetimes. And that’s what company spokespeople will want us to believe too.
…Except that it’s evidently not true when we look at the likes of manufacturers of junk food, sugary drinks or tobacco products!
Some harms caused by products accumulate imperceptibly on a day-to-day basis thus aren’t apparent before they have by then seriously afflicted paying customers. We are poor at regulating our own behaviours under these circumstances. This is the case with things like addictive substances, behaviourally addictive products that contribute to obesity, as well as activities that contribute to global warming or pollution. The long-term costs are discounted too steeply, especially when the immediate pleasures are high.
If even the customers themselves don’t care (e.g. they love to eat what’s unhealthy because it’s tasty, or they’ll buy whatever’s the cheapest or most convenient irrespective of welfare, fair trade or environmental friendliness) then these businesses aren’t going to want to forgo the revenue that’s to be made from such opportunities. They’ll rationally and self-interestedly supply that demand.
It’s about timescales – maximising profits per quarter is different to per decade. The faraway future is too uncertain to predict thus grab what you can for more certain right now. Plus in a competitive market where if you don’t grab a customer now to fill her/his stomach today – another business will gladly seize that opportunity and market share. You snooze you lose if you’re not ruthless enough. (Competition is thus a double-edged sword for society.)
From a CEO’s perspective, she/he probably isn’t planning on working forever either, so it doesn’t matter how long these customers live for as long as they don’t die immediately – she/he would like to have personally retired by then, after acquiring as much money as possible personally before then. (Fraudsters likewise often exit or ‘sunset’ after they feel like they’ve stolen enough or are pushing too far to the point of potentially getting caught. Executives of legitimate businesses often have their own personal exit plans too.) What state the customer base is in after that is for the next boss to deal with. Many investors will be nonchalant about it too because if a company isn’t making the best projected quarterly returns they can then they’ll just invest their money in another company that will. Some shareholders will care about the long-term direction of a company but others won’t – there’s no 50-year commitment to any particular stock. Well constantly expanding the business and attracting as much custom as possible (i.e. pushing one’s product onto customers as heavily as possible) is the main way to boost a share price and appease shareholders.
This results in aggressively advertising products that aren’t long-term healthy, including to children (where legal). A brand’s marketing/propaganda strategy would also be to deny any evidence that their products contribute to early deaths. Despite the various health problems related to regular high sugar consumption – they’ll in fact superficially attempt to associate themselves with ‘sportiness’, ‘fitness’ or ‘health’ by sponsoring major sporting events and basking in the reflected glories of athletes. They’re trying to exploit the ‘halo effect’. They want a socially respectable public image, and they can pump millions into manipulating it. But it’s just an image. They use colourful, child-friendly characters and innocent-looking marketing to hook customers in, and superficially associate themselves with good causes to obscure the harms of their products. Similarly, fossil fuel companies and airlines direct so much of their efforts on ‘greenwashing’ or trying to portray an image of being environmentally sensitive, even though they’re primarily behaving in directly contradicting ways. Marketing is about who can bull**** the best.
Something needs to impact a business’s bottom line before it decides to change. Industry-wide external regulatory pressures or higher tax rates are a couple of ways to change the amount of sugar, fat or salt in recipes or alternatively change the incentives to ultimately reduce the demand for things that aren’t long-term healthy for a population. Cultures can organically change without public policy interventions but products that are (essentially) addictive and/or produce negative externalities don’t make that easy.
But things that slowly harm what matters to us (e.g. asbestos, tobacco, lead paint, greenhouse gas emissions, CFCs) tend to lead to disputed science and stalled regulations because the links to their harms aren’t obvious due to their delayed effects, hence doubt can be easily cast. (Please read Post No.: 0636.) It’s hard to intuitively attribute the effect of lung cancer many years later to the cause of smoking today, for instance. It takes honest scientific research to confirm such links. Things that are okay in moderation or only contribute to a problem along with dozens of other potential factors find it easy to dodge specific regulations too.
The producers and sellers of these products are sometimes convinced they’re safe, but of course – whether they’re intentionally being deceptive or not – they have a self-interested profit motive that clouds their impartiality or judgements. Tobacco firms like Philip Morris in the past have tried to deny that smoking shortened lives, by using their own sponsored scientific researchers and physicians to try to prove that cigarettes are safe and possibly even good for us(!) They aggressively pushed cigarettes onto the population and tried to make it sound like it was only other brands that caused coughing and throat irritation – not all cigarettes. Even when the link with cancer was firmly established, the tobacco industry tried to precisely use the argument ‘why would we wish to give cancer to our customers and take a customer away from ourselves by killing them?’
The sugar and fossil fuel industries have produced their own biased research too, and instead of concentrating on the wider scientific community to face proper scrutiny, their tactic is to concentrate on hitting the media with headlines of ‘early findings’. They might commit deliberate sampling biases (e.g. only including countries that already had an obesity problem) then present their findings via press releases without transparently declaring that they or their partners actually funded the research. They’re going to dispute the efficacy of regulations and taxes. And the media, and in turn public, might believe that this information was from an independent source.
We might believe that a well-established company couldn’t have gotten so big if it wasn’t trustworthy and looking after our best interests – but it’s big because it looked after it’s own best interests! And their interests don’t always align with the long-term interests of their customers or the wider community, culture or environment. Factories often dump hazardous waste into waterways because it’s cheaper for them, rather than because it’s in our common interests.
It’s a numbers game and each individual customer means little as long as plenty remain. And wealth and power are relative, so it doesn’t really matter how much of the population remains – if people are dying then competing businesses are losing potential customers too! As long as you’re richer compared to your competitors then you’re politically more powerful than them, and you can lobby the government to serve your own interests better than them. There are political lobbyists from the Big Food, Big Energy, Big Tech, tobacco, gambling and firearms industries, amongst others.
They’ll push against independent, external regulations and claim that industry self-regulation is sufficient and optimal because ‘businesses naturally care about their long-term profitability and therefore the long-term welfare of their customers and the planet’. Companies like Unilever have part-funded anti-regulation-biased studies regarding sugar before. When industry lobbyists heavily influence public regulators – issues like food labelling, subsidisation and marketing laws aren’t treated independently and impartially. This presents a bind for governments – large companies usually employ large numbers of workers and contribute large (absolute) amounts in tax, but they might also harm the long-term interests of the population that the government is responsible for too.
Even in wild nature – if a virus, fungus or parasite kills its hosts (and consequently itself too) then it does. Many virus strains make their hosts too ill to get out of bed to spread itself onto others, which isn’t optimal for the virus. In nature, things can and do ‘bite the hands that feed them’, figuratively speaking. Species can inadvertently do things that cause their own extinction or decimation down the line.
Shareholders can de-invest, sending a business under – but the executives could retire nicely by then after lining their own pockets. Businesses are run by individuals after all. This most clearly happens with corporate raiding and asset stripping, or via frauds like ‘tunnelling’ (the transfer of assets and profits out of a business for the benefit of those who control them), or when high-level executives take advantage of lucrative golden handshakes or parachute severance packages, even for poor performance and even if some of their pay is linked to stock options – thus they’re cashing in even when the company they’re supposed to be running is performing badly and other workers are getting laid off. They, as individuals, can make a killing (in money and/or blood) then move on. We shouldn’t forget the snake oil merchants of the unregulated literal Wild West, and all other scammers that are still in existence, who fooled people for a quick buck then disappeared, not caring for future custom.
High-level executives might receive millions in bonuses even as their businesses are going under! Enough shareholders might object to this – or not because lots of shares nowadays are held by investment institutions that buy and sell stocks by the split-second (high-frequency trading) i.e. they don’t care about the long term (buy-and-hold) or the voting rights the shares may carry but the incredibly short term and trying to buy low and sell higher on a rapid basis. This places pressures on publicly-traded firms to maximise profits and constantly show that their immediate sales of hamburgers, alcohol or whatever are booming.
In short, profiting from slow/delayed deaths is still hugely fruitful because the customers aren’t immediately dying – and new potential customers are continually being born anyway – especially when one is selling something that’s in high demand, perhaps because it exploits an addiction or provides instant gratification (e.g. smoking, recreational drugs and alcohol produce small but cumulative toxic effects, as do products that are high in sugar, fat and/or salt) or generates negative externalities or costs that are passed onto others (e.g. pollution or biodiversity loss). Some things harm consumers only gradually, when the major effects only exhibit after massive profits have already been extracted from them, and they’ve by then likely had kids to make future generations of customers who’ll follow their parents’ lifestyles.
It’s not just the longevity of life but the quality of those years too, thus you can still be alive and be a paying customer but living with obesity-related diseases like diabetes, hypertension and sleep apnoea daily. The public health service bears the costs to deal with a nation’s health problems to keep people alive for as long as possible anyway – not these businesses! So cheers they privately think. Good folk should try to save others though so don’t blame institutions like the NHS for having the compassion and skills to prolong lives rather than let the regular customers of these businesses die off. It’s likewise mainly volunteers, charities and other businesses who/that are trying to undo the environmental damage caused by polluting businesses. That’s why the world hasn’t gone kaput yet.
Meow. So the interests of profit versus customer health, environmental welfare or similar aren’t always aligned, especially when the generated problems are latent. ‘Get in, get rich then get out’, costs to consumers that only manifest after years, or passed-on costs that only manifest after several generations downstream – are a few ways how businesses can profit from harming their customers.
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
