Product Tuning Narrowing your product range to include only high-priced fast movers increases your short-term profit. It also diminishes the variety you can offer your customers and degrades the quality of support you are able to provide. This severely increases your vulnerability to market change.

A further way to sustain high consumption is to cut out all slow-moving product types and concentrate on the popular fast-moving ones.

For instance, if the capitalist's enterprise is a book business, he will stock and sell only fast-moving pulp fiction and not handle any specialist books for which the cost is high and the market small.

The Price of Over-Tuning

The profit-driven commercial method has served society satisfactorily in many key areas in the past simply because businesses were not as finely tuned as they are now. Low-profit slow moving items vital to the consumer were not `tuned out' by modern analytical methods. For example, I have known the stock controller of times past who, through some antiquated sense of social responsibility, would always donate some of his storage space to discontinued items. This is because he knew that some old customer's obsolete machine may give out one day and he would need the new parts. His was a moral motive: not a commercial one. It contributed nothing to profit. Commercially it was a waste of space. But it was a great benefit to society in that it gave the greatest number of his customers a more secure and worry-free life.

With modern nit-combing profitability tuning, the managing director (now almost invariably an accountant driven only by the balance sheet of short-term monetary gain) will incisively carve out all such morally-motivated deadwood inefficiencies. "Who cares if some old artisan goes bust because he cannot obtain a discontinued component for his obsolete machine when we can increase our profitability figure on the next half-yearly account by 1.03%?" This meticulous tuning is not only done with respect to product lines, but also to market sectors. Companies cease to supply to sectors of the market (such as the poor) and put all their efforts into supplying more to the more profitable sectors.

The result is an attractive annual balance sheet and restricted customer service. Since most customers are individuals and most suppliers are large corporates, the customer simply has to accept what the supplier offers. How often we find a small cheap faulty component in an expensive car or household appliance simply `unobtainable' because it is not profitable for the supplier to distribute it as a separate item? This is especially true in high technology equipment. Manufacturers will now repair equipment only by replacing the complete module which contains the faulty component. So the customer has to buy a complete new module rather than just the faulty component within it.

Forcing the consumer to buy a complete new module - and in some cases a complete new product - is far more profitable to the manufacturer. For the consumer it is very unprofitable. It is also very wasteful and damaging to the ecological environment. It uses more material, more energy and creates more pollution and waste. But naturally capitalists' profit must come first because they are in control. At least in the short term. Until the market changes.