The Not So "Infinite" Pie

[The_Professor]

When people are buying fewer cars , or cars of increased competition the company has to shrink , shrinking is better than dieing.

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But people aren't buying fewer cars. They are buying fewer GM cars. GM could have made more desirable cars staring in the 1980's. They designed the most boring and awful cars sold anywhere in the 1980's. Instead of innovating, they decided to push trucks, because trucks could guzzle, whereas cars could not. They put leather seats and all manner of cushy crap on huge, lumbering, gas-guzzling trucks and advertised these as a proper way to take little Becky-Sue to ballet class.

GM had the ability to make reliable, fuel efficient cars like Camrys, Sentras, Altimas and such, but they peddled Suburbans and Silverados and Azteks. They screwed up bigtime in the 80's, and followed that with peddling trucks to people had no real need of trucks in the 90's.  Only now are they coming around and building reliable cars like the Chevy Malibu.

The execs got raises, and the workers, who had nothing to do with the stupidity of poor R&D, got the sack.

Will there ever be a Chevy Volt? They seem to be spending a huge amount of money advertising a car no one can buy or even sit in at the auto show.

The reason they designed these cars was NOT due to gasoline efficiency issues but for profit. Loading them down with luxury items like leather, etc heightened their profits.

[Xavier_Onassis]

The reason they designed these cars was NOT due to gasoline efficiency issues but for profit. Loading them down with luxury items like leather, etc heightened their profits.

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Well, duh. They peddled trucks because trucks could guzzle and not bring down their CAFE averages for cars.
They made bazillions on these ugly things, but they had to know that the day of $3.00 gal. gas would bite them in the butt someday. AS usual, it bit the workers' butts, not the executives'.

Roger Smith got a nice fat raise every year he was pres. of GM.
Every years, they lost market share.
Every years they built crappy cars. legendarily crappy cars.

By the time the got the bugs out of the Olds Diesels and the Caddy Allante, no one wanted to touch them.

There was never a reason to touch a Cadillac Cimarron.

[Amianthus]

this sounds crazy but I think some of those will lose thier social security benefits by taking it
I seem to remember quite afew people working for me were early retirees

You can take the package, and defer collections on social security until you qualify for that. Or, you can defer collecting on the package and work a few years, sometimes the early retirement packages are structured so that the payout is larger if you wait to collect it.

You cannot "lose" social security unless you die before you are eligible to collect.