Jenny Craig customers do it all the time – pay money to consume less. This may make perfect sense to people who understand customers’ needs, but to others it seems really stupid to pay somebody to help use less of something. This is a bit like utility programs that spend money for customers to use less of their product. The vast majority of our energy work comes from referrals and repeat clients. On numerous occasions, we seemed to have customers at the tipping point, only to have them bail out at the last minute. Why? The utility introduced us to…
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I read this article http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-01-05-home-energy-efficiency-demand_N.htm and the thought came to mind, “are energy efficiency incentives really incentives pushing people to implement energy efficiency - or coupons offering a discount for energy efficiency measures?” What’s the difference? I would say it’s huge. Retailers abhor it when the trained shopper waits for deep discounts to buy, obviously at a much lower profit margin. Likewise, there is nothing airlines hate worse than an airfare war. Buyers of “American made” automobiles (GM, Ford, Chrysler) have been trained to wait for huge incentives, which is one of the reasons two of three essentially failed. Again,…
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Unless you were living in a cave four or five years ago, you know Wal-Mart was under relentless assault by, I’ll just call them activists. Complaints included: They weren’t providing health care to enough people. They weren’t paying overtime. Their goods were manufactured in sweat shops overseas. When unions tried to organize their meat cutting operations, Wal-Mart exited the meat cutting business. Their executives were making too much money. The company was making too much money. Part of the real gripe was that Wal-Mart had saturated the rural and small town markets and they had started to impinge into larger…
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