Ferengi are rubbish businessmen

Post by **Mikey** » Wed May 21, 2008 1:03 am

Personally, I draw the line at the "following the law" bit - if it were my business, I'd of course also try to help the employees and community as much as I could, but I won't count that as a requirement for not being categorized as "evil."

Duskofdead · Post by **Duskofdead** » Wed May 21, 2008 1:12 am

Well in my experience (which counts for nothing maybe) all of them break laws. Whether that's tax laws or deduction laws or legal employment laws, or employment safety laws, or overtime laws, somewhere, if you did a stringent investigation of everyone, you would easily find something. That's just my opinion, but I'm yet to find the exception, and I work on hundreds of business accounts in some fashion or another. And most if not all of them would claim that they were just doing what they had to do to survive, and they didn't see anything wrong with it.

sunnyside · Post by **sunnyside** » Wed May 21, 2008 1:26 am

On the note of Ferengi. Could it be a case of buyer beware? For example Quark was origionally going to kill himself to fulfill a contract.

So it could be that you could deal with them well enough if you have a good lawyer. Which seems fairly accurate for todays world.

It's also possibly their shady nature allows them to outprice other people. I mean we have a "Oh my gosh some product from China is killing people/dogs" thing every year or so but it doesn't slow down our purchases.

Post by **Teaos** » Wed May 21, 2008 1:30 am

I dont think they were ever said to be the ultimate salesmen. Just a race of people who put profit before anything else.

Post by **Mikey** » Wed May 21, 2008 9:35 pm

Duskofdead wrote:Well in my experience (which counts for nothing maybe) all of them break laws. Whether that's tax laws or deduction laws or legal employment laws, or employment safety laws, or overtime laws, somewhere, if you did a stringent investigation of everyone, you would easily find something. That's just my opinion, but I'm yet to find the exception, and I work on hundreds of business accounts in some fashion or another. And most if not all of them would claim that they were just doing what they had to do to survive, and they didn't see anything wrong with it.

Ever "blown the whistle" on anyone? I'd be curious to see the ramifications of that.

Duskofdead · Post by **Duskofdead** » Wed May 21, 2008 11:04 pm

Ever "blown the whistle" on anyone? I'd be curious to see the ramifications of that.

No. Honestly if I blew it on one I'd have to blow it on all of them, and that's the end of my job-- this is public accounting, I don't work for a government agency or anything where I would have any protection. But I have secretly cheered when one of the businesses employing illegal immigrants got sued or threatened to be sued by an employee who claimed they weren't paid, or weren't paid for their overtime. Because the company can't prove it (the employee was off the pay charts and under the table) and if they say yes this was our employee and we DID pay them what we owed them, then they have penalty issues and taxes owed for cheating on their payroll taxes basically. I consider it karma. Here you have these business owners claiming their sales are so low and their business so poor that they can't even afford more than 1-2 people on payroll and oops, look, they actually had about 30 employees.

As I said earlier, the big companies do it too, but they do it more on the macro level or in somewhat less obvious ways. So I can't name as many explicit, easy to understand examples in their case. Let's just say it usually involves playing more games in terms of "technically being pseudo law abiding" but twisting and bending laws into silly shapes in order to do so. In other words staying just on the safe side of the gray area, but still basically cheating. Of course once in awhile you have someone do it in a huge honking way, and then CitiCorp or Enron happens. But all of them play with that fire to some extent, whether the little guy sees it or not. In fact a lot of people flat out call it that-- a game. You're playing a game with the gov't where the objective is to pay them as little as possible.

Post by **Mikey** » Wed May 21, 2008 11:54 pm

I certainly couldn't blame you for considering your own livelihood. To wit, my sister was working for Prudential (though not in the insurance division) when they went through the scandal of not having bonded assetts to cover their re-insurance issues. I won't bore you with the details of the regulations covering P&C re-insurance, but suffice it to say that on the "macro" level what they did is considered quite as bad as twisting or gifting on the consumer-agent level.