Mini financial crisis

Salve.

If you came here last Friday expecting to read Cicero’s latest dose of wit and wisdom, you will have been disappointed. Apologies if that was you but Cicero was once again taking a wee break to ensure he was sano in corpore as well as sano in mente. It is good of you to persevere to get your weekly fix. Hopefully you will find the wait worthwhile.

And while he was away Cicero came across this interesting story which he feels many should read and take on board.

Many years ago a very clever designer called Alec Issigonis designed the world’s first smart car. It was called the Mini and for its time it was truly revolutionary. For the first time ever a miniature vehicle that was a genuine car.

First he put the engine in sideways. This saved masses of space under the bonnet. It didn’t need any transmission-whatever that might be. Then he used sliding windows instead of the wind-down kind. This saved lots of space on the width of the doors. He used smaller wheels to save on height.

He left the welds on the outside, to save on manufacturing costs. It was the smallest-ever genuine four-seater car.

And, fifty years on, it’s considered the most influential car of the 20th century.

In 1959, Issigonis showed the original designs to the head of the British Motor Corporation, Leonard Lord who asked “How much will it cost?” Issigonis said “I don’t know. I’m a designer not a production engineer.” Lord said “The Ford Anglia is selling for £600. I want this priced at under £500.”

So that’s what they did.

The Mini sold for £470.It was a massive hit worldwide. It even beat every car in the world to win the Monte Carlo Rally. Not once, but four years running.

Everyone fell in love with it.

In a really smart marketing move, Minis were given to stylish celebrities like Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Peter Sellers. So they’d be seen in newspaper photographs getting out of them.

It became a truly classless icon. Today it would have its own Twitter and Facebook site and surely even a super-injunction, this year’s must have accessory.

Ford, who made the competitive Anglia, was mystified. How could BMC sell it so cheaply?

So the engineers at Ford got hold of a Mini. They stripped it down. Every nut and bolt, every weld and clip. They found it was well built. They reported that it would cost Ford £35 more per car to build than BMC were selling it at. And Ford was a much more efficient carmaker than BMC. So BMC had to be losing between £50 and £100 on every Mini they sold.

Years later, when the BMC management were asked about this they shrugged their shoulders.

So what? They were a state-owned company, everything was subsidised. This means it was paid for by the taxpayers of the time. Good to know that State employees in these olden days had the same attitude as today’s Apparatchiks. But they had a runaway success on their hands. So successful that they eventually sold 5 million Minis, worldwide.

What was the problem?

Well, actually, that was the problem. They sold 5 million cars at a loss of at least £50 each.

That adds up to a loss of over £250,000,000. Not a smart way to run a company. Even Cicero can see that and he knows nothing about cars.

Which is probably why BMC doesn’t exist anymore.And Ford does. And why it is never sensible for State Apparatchiks to run anything remotely like a business.

Chasing volume, increased sales, is a kneejerk reaction for marketers. But it’s not always a sensible route to go. Selling something cheaper usually means more people will buy it. But it might make more sense to put the price up and sell less. At the time BMC went out of business they were only making £5 profit on ever car sold. At the same time Mercedes were making around £1,000 profit on every car sold. For BMC to make the same profit as Mercedes, they would need to sell 200 times as many cars.
And that was never going to happen.

In the case of the Mini someone didn’t do their job. That’s why I think it always makes sense to question a brief or an instruction. It is never the right thing to blindly accept it or do what you are told because someone with the right job title gives it to you. Anything worthwhile should stand up to scrutiny by common sense. And common sense is available to everyone. But then we also know that sense is never common.

Is it only me.......but we don’t all have 20:20 vision.

Now over the years I have spent many nights in hotels. Big ones, small ones, some nice, some not so nice. But over the years taking a shower has become increasingly difficult. Sadly this is an age related-affliction.

Firstly showers don’t all work in the same way and it would be very helpful if there was an ISO standard to regulate how showers work. Often you are confronted with a multitude of levers and dials regulating pressure of water and temperature and in my experience the more stylish the hotel and the more stylish the shower, the more complicated and obtuse the operating instructions.

There you are in your hotel suite wearing nothing but a perplexed facial look, staring at the polished chrome trying to work out how to switch the damn thing on without getting scalded or inducing hypothermia or being blown backwards onto the shower wall through sheer nozzle force. Believe me but in some hostelries it has taken me a good few moments before I have cracked the ideal permutation of levers and dials. Sometimes it feels more like safe cracking than showering.

But there is another problem.

In every hotel bathroom you get a small array of bottles. Again the posher the hotel the more wee bottles you get-potions for this and that, shower gels, shampoos, conditioners, anti ageing cream and so on and so forth. I have not yet seen stuff for conditions like acne and other embarrassing conditions but am sure that somewhere out there some really posh hotel will offer that.

But my problem with these is that the writing on these wee bottles is so small that I live in dread that I am going to put something totally inappropriate on some part of my anatomy that I shouldn’t. To read the size of print that those who design these wee bottles put on their labels, either I need put on my Gregory Peck’s or practice my Braille. But who wears their Gregory’s in the shower?

Now it might only be me but I cannot be the only one who has eye sight problems and who requires a pince nez make the printed word legible. We are not all young, hip and trendy with 20:20 vision so could wee bottle makers please make their labels legible. We should start a campaign for legible labels on bottles in hotel bathrooms. I am convinced there is a gap market for these.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.