Circuit City, Belkin, Others Do the "Obviously Stupid"

Watching businesses at times is like sitting through a comedy. You see people doing something so obviously stupid, so clearly set to blow up in their faces, that you want to bury your face and say, “No, stop now!” But they don’t and it does. This seems to have popped up in high tech with a ferocious frequency over the last year or so. In fact, such actions are becoming so common that I think we need a new term: Obviously Stupid, or OS.

Start with Circuit City. Yes, the company is closing down, yes, it’s a shame, and, yes, management screwed up big time.

[George Whalin, president and CEO of Retail Management Consultants] said management mistakes over the past few years combined with the recession brought down Circuit City.”This company made massive mistakes,” he said, citing a decision to get rid of sales people and other mismanagement.

Why did management cut the sales people? Because they figured their business was about making profits, not helping customers find products that suited them. Clearly the consumers could find other places to go, and they did. I wonder if Best Buy is really that far ahead in terms of its practices. Recently my wife and I were considering a phone, went to a Best Buy, and asked about the frequency at which a phone worked. No one could answer the question, so we opened the box and looked.

“You can’t do that!” said a clerk, rushing over. My wife and I laughed. Of course we could — we just had. That gave us the answer, and the fact that no one in the store had offered to do as much to help us sent us elsewhere to make a purchase. Treating customers as though they owe you something is just dumb business, and if the chain isn’t more careful, it might find a way to follow Circuit City off to that great mall in the sky.

Assuming that all people are always gullible is another mark of something that is OS. Belkin allegedly did just that if the report that it was trying to pay people to write glowing reviews of its products, whether they had used them or not is true. Given that the request apparently was made by someone in the business development area of Belkin, it would be hard to believe that the company didn’t know about the tactic. And if it didn’t, how could management not follow execution of strategy more closely? [UPDATE: Gizmodo has word from an allegedly inside-Belkin person confirming questionable PR activities.]

I don’t think you can count business decisions that are simply bad, like Yahoo’s board spurning a buy-out from Microsoft because it wasn’t high enough. That’s borderline, but still falling within the realm of bad business decision. But you could include Microsoft and its insistence on Vista, making it the first OS OS.

Sometimes the stupidity is smaller and ironic, like the spell check in the version of WordPress I use for BNET not recognizing the words blog, blogger, or blogging. Other times it is big, like Apple having that enormous customer activation pile-up with the new version of the iPhone after it had faced the identical problem the year before. Any company could find its systems weren’t up to an important task. But when the same thing happens twice at critical times? Usually managers fire people for things like that — only this was a case where they’d have to fire themselves.

I know it’s late for New Year’s resolutions, but perhaps the industry could consider the idea of putting an end to OS simply fashionably late and adopt it anyway.

Banana peel image via Flickr user a.drian, CC 2.0.