SHANNON KELLY
Editor-in Chief
I babysat this adorable, sweet, well-mannered 3-year-old a couple years ago and ruined her. Every time she cried I gave her candy, and she stopped crying (brilliant, I know). I haven’t seen her since (surprisingly her parents found a different babysitter), but I’m assuming she’s either a pretty pudgy 5-year-old (nothing wrong with that) or she cries all the time and her parents don’t keep candy in the house.
While I do not regret my tactic (I sure won’t use it with my own children), I do wish there had been a way for me to tell Apple CEO Steve Jobs about my experience before he started giving candy to all of the whiney babies who bought his iPhone for $600. Now they’re throwing tantrums because he lowered the gadget’s price by $200 and they don’t think it’s fair (whimper, whimper).
I had Hershey’s Kisses, Jobs has $100 Apple store credits. He’s handing them out as willingly and unabashedly as I handed out Kisses. That is no way to handle whiners.
After receiving hundreds of cry-baby e-mails from upset customers, Jobs posted a letter for them to read. It starts out exactly how I would expect a letter from a successful, brilliant CEO to read – fairly unapologetic and peppered with little lessons about consumerism in a free market. And that’s how it should have ended.
He assures the temper-flared buyers he made the correct decision to lower the price, explains his reasons for doing so (because he’ll make more money … obviously), and then reminds those who purchased the product “the technology road is bumpy.”
“This is life in the technology lane,” he says. Bam. I love that part.
That’s what I should have said to the teary eyed toddler I babysat, “This is life in the sugar-free appropriate small child discipline lane my little friend.”
Still smiling over Jobs’ pragmatic prose, I read on enthusiastically awaiting the next hard-hitting “I didn’t hold a gun to your heads forcing you to shell out $600” line. But it didn’t come. Instead, Jobs’ backs down.
“Even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of the iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job of taking care of our early iPhone customers…therefore, we have decided to offer…a $100 store credit.” The letter fell to my lap (in slow motion, of course) and I put my head in my hands, taking a moment to think “why Steve, why.”
He was on such a roll with this letter about what a hard road it is in the real world of the market – “The technology lane,” he calls it (appropriately named, seeing his market is technology-driven).
Some people have more money than others and some are willing to spend it on overpriced products. And CEOs, understand the market. So they price their products accordingly. And consumers understand this, but they buy the overpriced product anyway because they want to be the first. They want people to say “you have the iPhone? Wow, I thought only a select few could get their hands on that thing.”
And so Jobs put his product out there for the splurging few (those with the extra cash dollars), knowing full well that once the select few let the others play with their iPhones a few times, they too would want to buy them. But they wouldn’t have the funds, so Jobs would have to lower the price. So he did. And that is how it should have ended.
But his Public Relations squad tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Well, Steve maybe we should be nicer. Maybe you need to do more than create an incredible product, for which people were actually willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money. You just need to do more for them.”
And so he did.
“We want to do the right thing for our valued iPhone customers. We apologize for disappointing some of you,” he ends the letter.
“Love and kisses (on your rears) – Steve Jobs.”
09-21-07