Why were Flim and Flam "bad"?

[Key Gear 6,662]

holy tl;dr batman!!!

 

but i just feel like I should point out that until they started falling behind and resorted to using any old thang in their cider, the Flim Flam brothers were making some pretty top notch stuff! It was incredibly efficient AND it was at least just as good as the Apple Family's cider.

 

Exactly!

 

This is the thing that drove me absolutely crazy when I first watched the episode. I mean, literally, I would wake up in the middle of the night and just wonder why they messed themselves over.

 

They really did have "opportunity in this community"! They could have contributed to the local cider production, made a large profit, and everyone could have been happy.

 

I avoided saying this in my original post because this is a dead horse I beat a lot. However, I think I'm going to give my theory on why the Flim Flam brothers messed everything up for themselves.

 

The Flim Flam brothers really do remind me of some (very few, but they are out there) young people in real life that graduate from business school with a degree in sales or marketing and then pursue this strategy:

• Find a really smart person with a big heart and no business sense
• Get this really smart person to pour a mountain of energy and effort making a product that they love
• After the product is created, get rid of the really smart person and present the product to the world as your own creation

In the real world, for a business person to succeed in getting their business off of the ground and into the air, they have to have a delirious and fanatical belief in what they are doing. Every day, they should pour every ounce of themselves into every single thing that they do. Then, the next day, they should wake up and do it again.

 

The Flim Flam brothers were all about the marketing. They, literally, had a great song and dance, but they honestly didn't seem to have much actual love for their product. If they truly cared about their cider, then they would have never allowed a crappy product to get to their customers.

 

The Flim Flam brothers had no passion for their product. They probably thought that they did because of their wonderful singing, but, in reality, to show that you have passion for your product, you must have fanatical care for every aspect of your business - not just the marketing.

 

The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 could have done the job. It could have done the job quite nicely. The cider that it made honestly was good. However, Flim and Flam behaved as though they did not even have the slightest clue about the actual capabilities of their own machine.

 

Here, I'm going to be completely honest here. Besides the problem that I have with their oddball business decisions, my other problem with the Flim Flam brothers was not their nasty tactics. My other problem with them is that they seemingly didn't care about their product at all.

 

I am only really familiar with the tech industry, so my examples are a bit biased, but....

• Bill Gates was a fantastically aggressive corporate guy, but he really, really did have a vision of putting a computer on every desk. That vision drove him.
• Steve Jobs was another guy that was renown for being very aggressive, but he really did believe in an insanely high standard of product quality.
• Mark Zuckerberg... Well... Yeah... But he really, honestly does passionately believe that social networks (and, apparently, the end of privacy as we know it) are the future of the Internet

What did the Flim Flam brothers believe in? Where was the vision? It seemed to me that they were all about cheap gimmicks and showmanship. For whatever reason, they failed to respect their own product and the process that went into its creation.

 

Actually, I think that there is an opportunity here for someone to write a fan fiction about the whole cider incident. It could probably run sort of similar to the Facebook movie or Pirates of Silicon Valley. The only difference would be that in this fan fiction the Flim Flam brothers would lose in the end.

Edited April 2, 2012 by Scootacool

[Coco Pommel 669]

Because capitalism = greediness. Flim and Flam showed how businesses will do anything to get money. Socialism is where it's at.