Category: Corporate Fuckery

Product Consolidation

Corporate Fuckery, Finance, The Gun Thing

…as Ruger might call it, or as others (like myself) might call it: “heritage destruction”.

Ruger officials confirmed industry chatter this week that it would immediately stop producing four models, while it will halt production of several others at the end of the year. 

Production of four revolver lines – some going back to 1958 – would be suspended, effective immediately: 

    • LCR
    • SP101
    • GP100
    • Bearcat

On Tuesday, the company announced changes to several current-generation product families as part of its ongoing Ruger 2030 strategy.

“These decisions reflect our review of consumer demand, evolving market preferences, manufacturing complexity and the long-term profitability of each product family,” Abbey Clary, Ruger’s director of media, advertising and public relations, told Guns.com in an email. “The goal is to focus our resources on the products consumers want most today while creating capacity for future product development and manufacturing modernization.”

I leave it to y’all to decide what Clary really means with the above corporate wafflespeak, but a decent summary might be:  “If you ain’t gonna buy ’em, we ain’t gonna make ’em”.

Fair enough.  Revolvers, and the people who love shooting them, are clearly a dying market (literally, in the latter case).

But the good news doesn’t end there, oh no.

A larger group of products are nearing suspension, with their final planned production runs through the remainder of 2026. They include:

    • SR1911
    • LC Carbine
    • PC Charger
    • PC Carbine
    • LC Charger
    • Redhawk
    • Super Redhawk
    • Blackhawk
    • Super Blackhawk
    • Single-Series (Six- and Nine) revolvers
    • Vaquero
    • Ruger No. 1
    • 77-Series rifles
    • Hawkeye
    • Ruger Precision Rifle

…leaving one to ask, as the article does, well what the fuck is left?

Rifles:

  • Mini-14 rifle
  • Ruger 10/22
  • Ruger American Rifle
  • Harrier series AR-15s

Pistols:

  • LCP Security 380 and Security 9
  • RXM
  • MAX-9
  • Ruger 57
  • 22 Charger
  • Mark IV

How nice of them to leave us with at least the 10/22 and Mark IV.

Ruger are quitting the 1911 market (probably because their offerings sucked green donkey dicks, so no great loss there), and ditto the “precision” rifle market (because people who do precision rifle shooting generally go for higher-quality platforms like Bergara, Howa and Sako, while for the budget-conscious, there’s always Savage).

Oh, and the relaunch of the excellent Red Label shotguns is irrelevant, because Ruger’s outsourcing the production thereof to Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing (CSMC) so it’s just a label on someone else’s gun.  I suppose we should be glad that they’re using an American gunmaker instead of some backyard Turkish suppliers.

As a one-time corporate marketing puke myself, I can understand why Ruger is doing this.

As a lifelong gun enthusiast — and a lifelong Ruger buyer — I’m feeling nothing but gloom and despair.

It makes all sorts of sense, financially speaking;  but the joy of shooting Ruger’s incomparable revolvers has just left the building, after kicking people like me in the mouth.

I’m not sure I’ll ever buy a Ruger product again.

Added Snoopery

Corporate Fuckery, Surveillance Society

Reader Mike L. points me at this latest example of Panopticalism:

Baystate Health is introducing new artificial intelligence-based weapons detection systems across its hospital facilities to enhance patient and visitor safety.

The technology combines traditional hardware with AI tools to screen people as they enter the building. By detecting specific metal masses and weapon-like shapes, the system allows daily items such as pacemakers, wheelchairs, phones and wallets to pass through without setting off alarms.

The system utilizes technology similar to what is used at schools and sporting events to detect prohibited items, including firearms, knives and electronic smoking devices. To accommodate the system at Baystate Medical Center, the hospital is closing its pediatric emergency department entrance to establish a single entry point where everyone passes through the detector.

Forget it, Jake.  It’s Massachusetts.  (Motto:  Where your pets have more rights than YOU do.)

That said, BOLO for similar fuckery in your state or city — and not just in hospitals either, because if the tech exists today, expect it to spread like the bubonic plague by tomorrow.  It’s like the loathsome Flock cameras, only with added bastardy.

Adding Profit

Corporate Fuckery, Travels

If ever we needed more proof that Big Air (not Congress, that’s a rant for another time) are a bunch of chiseling bastards, here’s the latest:

American Airlines announced Tuesday that it plans to add seatback screens to its aircraft and to increase the number of premium and extra-legroom seating in some aircraft.

I don’t care about the screens because I seldom if ever use them unless it’s to follow the flight’s progress on that little map thingy.

I really care about the seat issue because lest we forget, some twenty or so years ago airlines began reducing seat sizes and cramming the smaller seats into ever-smaller spaces within the planes.  Yeah, the feeling went in Big Air Finance, that’s fine, especially as that enabled them to buy smaller-and-yet-smaller aircraft without losing passenger count.

Now, of course, to ride in their cramped aluminum tubes you have to have the approximate body shape of Victoria Hervey to fit in the seats, coupled with the approximate height of Peter Dinklage to have any kind of legroom.


(photos not drawn to scale;  Dinklage actually comes up
to just above Hervey’s navel)

Now, as customer discontent has grown to a fever pitch — most especially, of course by those poor souls (i.e. everyone who can’t afford the bloated fares of first- and business class) thus cramped into a fetal position for a lengthy flight — American is now installing “premium” seats with “extra legroom”.  (The “premium” refers to the prices they’ll be charging, and the “extra” is how much more you’ll have to pay.)

How much extra?  Here’s an example:

Note that the departure times are different — i.e. different flights — because the earlier flight had sold out of Premium Economy seats.

If the above doesn’t give you the Warm & Fuzzies, then you obviously aren’t an American Airlines accountant.

For the rest of us, however:

At this point, I need to warn y’all that at some time next year I have to fly to the Old Racist Republic — details unimportant, because personal — and I’ll be raffling off several guns to be able to afford the Economy fare (don’t even think about Premium, of course).


(Delta because I refuse to fly on any Muslim airline, fukkem)

Wheeee… eighteen hours in steerage:  I can hardly wait.

Please set your budgets accordingly.

Sneaky Stuff

Corporate Fuckery

From Reader Steve S. via email:

“This is the next step with the ‘add a tip’ option on the kiosks & checkout pads. Shake Shack’s kiosk demonstrates what happens when you don’t have a printed menu, but instead the kiosk displays what the computer is programmed to do. It asks for a ‘tip’, and if you chose ‘zero’, it increases the price of every item ordered by $0.50. As he notes, the kiosk in this case put up a pop-up noting the ‘price adjustment’, but how many kiosks are programmed to do it in the background where you will only see the total?

“I note it is Shake Shack, but have to believe that other vendors will do the same thing as long as they feel they can get away with it.”

I know a basic response to this bullshit.

Pay cash instead of using a card.

This, by the way, will actually have two effects.  Firstly, you won’t be caught up in this little bit of highway robbery.  Secondly, paying cash — actual cash — will remind you just how expensive so-called “convenience” food has become, which may result in you visiting these places on fewer occasions.

Just another way that “convenience” + “technology” = “ripoff”.

Oh, and one last thing:  for most retailers, the extended cost of handling cash is actually higher than paying the card transaction fee.

Yer welcome.

On a personal note, I have to say that I last bought a burger from Shake Shack about four years ago, and was thoroughly unimpressed.  Never again.

Our local BBQ joint has a menu item called a “French Fries Plate”, which consists of a hearty portion of pulled pork, mixed with cheesy fries, for about $14.  That may sound like a lot;  but when I say the portion is “hearty”, I mean that it’s enough to feed both New Wife and me — and $7 each for a takeout meal is not all that bad.  Plus, the food quality is excellent, something few people can say about takeout burgers, from any establishment.

Inevitable

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Management

As with so many of their articles, this one at American Thinker does an admirable job of delving deep into the minutiae — this time of the European car manufacturing malaise — and comes up with the inevitable conclusion.  First, though the writer tees up the argument with a statement that is obvious to most of us:

Looking at the global automotive market, one conclusion is unavoidable: the end of the combustion engine is nowhere in sight.

When I say it’s obvious, I mean that anyone with a brain could see that the constraints of the combustion engine’s purported replacements — electricity especially, and ditto hydrogen power — had just too many negatives to make any replacement a lengthy (and super-costly) affair.

So why, then, did the Big Brains in the German automotive industry go so hard after electric cars, devoting billions of dollars into the creation of manufacturing facilities dedicated to the Big New Thing?  Here’s AT‘s take:

But one thing is clear: an energy policy detached from economic reality, driven by climate-apocalyptic ambitions, has harmed the industry at least as much as strategic mistakes at the management level.

We’ve looked at the climate-apocalyptics many times before on these pages, and once again, we all knew that the Watermelons had an agenda that, to be charitable, wasn’t just about Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©, but also about crippling Western capitalism to “level the playing field” with Third World nations.

We also know that when it comes to that kind of neo-socialist government mindset of the German government — and most of the other Euro governments — the idea of central control is seductive, nay imperative.  So it would be logical, in their eyes, to mandate that electric cars constitute a large majority of the auto market by x date (2030), and therefore it had to happen.

Of course, when you set yourself against market forces — especially one as entrenched as automotive power — you’re going to fail utterly absent some massive and ummm super-costly infrastructure creation, even assuming that any government had the cash and resources to actually implement such a construction project inside that timeline (and none do, not even the U.S.).

Which leads to the question:  if this scenario is so glaringly obvious, why did German car manufacturers not stand up to their government and say, “No.”?

Well, all corporations are lickspittles to their respective governments in the end, so such resistance is of course unthinkable.  But Thomas Kolbe supplies another factor:

The tragedy of Germany’s automotive industry is not that it failed to recognize technological change. On the contrary: few industries have invested more resources over recent decades into researching new drive technologies.

The deeper problem is German overconfidence: a hidden statism and an arrogance cultivated by decades of undeniable success — the belief that Germany could not only identify the technology of the future but also predict its entire development path.

A mixture of technological hubris and a belief in unlimited manageability — a character flaw that prepares the ground for failure.

To believe one can outsmart the market, to know more than millions of economic actors operating through decentralized information networks: Is this the German disease?

If so, it’s a disease that has infected Germany since Bismarck’s time — the auto manufacturing industry being just the latest manifestation (the earlier one was militarism).

I guess they should have just stuck to doing brilliant engineering — except that their political class (like most political classes) are just as wedded to the concept of social engineering as Mercedes is to automotive engineering.

There’s a broader lesson to be learned here, but I’m not at all sanguine of anyone actually learning it.

Future, By Subscription Only

Corporate Fuckery, Technology

Reader Stephen S. chimes in with this little piece of technological bastardy:

The rapidly approaching future of the Windows PC is no longer just about what’s on your desk, but what you’re permitted—by subscription—to access from the cloud. Microsoft promotes this as inevitable and, to some, the advantages are real. Yet for those uncomfortable with their digital world being defined and priced by a faraway corporation, alternatives remain.
What is worse is that Microsoft will have your data on their cloud (OneDrive) and you will need to continually pay to have access to it.   On the flip side, because it is on “their” computer systems (1970’s Supreme Court Decision), they will be able to scan it and use it for training their AI.  They will also be able to sell your data to 3rd parties, again because it is on “their” computers.  [Microsoft has already changed their EULA to reflect this]
How does the medical profession make sure the patients’s data is secure.  Although on a personal level, I’m sure Microsoft’s AI would love finding out about illness discussions, personal behavior, etc to be sold to 3rd parties.  That kind of info is what insurance companies would love to know, and the users would be paying Microsoft to provide it to them.
But a larger point occurs to me.  Microsoft would be getting the financial data for people and businesses smaller than the DOW 50, and that is a gold mine for them (Wall St spends millions to collect it).  Again, the users are paying Microsoft to provide their financials to Microsoft, and then Microsoft can then use it.

How nice.

It has taken me a Herculean effort to stop this OneDrive bullshit from imposing itself on my paltry online existence, and I’m not even sure that I’ve been that successful.  I get the occasional “warning” email that my OneCloud subscription has expired or my storage allocation is full, and that they can no longer store any more of my data — to which, of course, my unspoken response is:  I never wanted you to store my data anyway, so fuck off.

I have no idea how this is going to end, or if it ever will.