And with this, I would like to say to those who voted for the merger joke: DUH!

(Sorry, I was an hp employee at the time of the scam)

I was in the meeting. The overwhelming attitude of the little stock holders was completely against the purchase of Compaq. Hewlett got a standing ovation. Only the institutions - blackmail against Deutsch Bank for their vote was suspected - supported the merger.

The 14th(?) speaker was an HP employee with his 6th HP patent pending. His first comment was that their group's #1 competitor was Cisco - and Carly Fiorina was a BoD of Cisco. Clearly conflict of interest. I wish his statement and question was written. It shocked Carly so noticeably that she soon terminated the meeting.

Even French HP employees had flown to the meeting because they were so against this merger that had no product oriented reason to occur. Fiorina - a midevil history major and a salesman for Lucent - had no concept of a product oriented perspective. Four years later, the MBA games appeared on the spread sheets - lackluster. Unlike Apple under Spindler and Sculley, the HP BoDs recognized this problem at its source. They forced the bean counter Carly out.

Cutco knives. I sold those. My mom still has her set, they're the best knives she's ever used, she says. I do like the handles on them, and the steak knives are boss.

pampered chef is aight too. Rainbow vacuum cleaners - a guy came to the door and sold mom one of those, too (after my sister had given her name as a reference). it works exactly as advertised, too.

So does this one cleaner that a guy comes buy and sells about once every 6 months. It's called "avantage", and i assume the misspelling is intentional. but that stuff rocks.

in all those cases, a good PRODUCT was being sold, and we didn't mind a bit that it was being sold from something other than a retail outlet.

I'm convinced there's some perverse behaviors in the system that no one involved notices.

For instance, suppose an item appears on the shelf and sells out the first week. Then it isn't restocked for the rest of the month. Perhaps this pattern continues for a while. Then some analyst (or analysis program, more likely) will (on the last week of the month) take an exponentially decaying average of the sales of the product, determine that (because it had zero sales in the last three weeks) it just doesn't sell and shouldn't be restocked.

I love Cutco knives. You will notice a significant difference if you use other high end knives (e.g. Wustoff).

Agreed, the chain puts things on sale without telling the dept. managers so they can plan on having enough on hand. I think they want to give out rain checks so people will come back. I don't think they realize how many get pissed off and don't come back. :smack: