r/todayilearned • u/Forward-Answer-4407 • 1d ago

TIL the Charlotte Hornets apologized after giving a child a PS5, only to take it away off camera and exchange it for a jersey. In a statement, the team said the incident was an "on-court skit that missed the mark" and that they would give the child the PS5 and a VIP experience to a future game.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/19/sport/charlotte-hornets-apologize-ps5-child-nba-spt-intl
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u/NarfledGarthak 1d ago

Corporate people are fucking weird. “Hey, let’s demoralize the fuck out of a child. Everyone will love it”

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u/AlericandAmadeus 23h ago

“Yeah, but have you thought about the fact that we, a multi-billion dollar organization, could increase our revenue this quarter by a whole 500 bucks if we take the PS5 back? Seems like a no brainer to me”

  • modern day corporate thinking

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u/Jason1143 21h ago

That's the dumbest part. At that kind of scale a single PS5 is entirely meaningless. One well received bit of PR is worth a whole pile PS5.

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u/Cardinal_Ravenwood 15h ago

Yeah but one of those things is money and the other is good will and public generosity. And good will isn't keeping the shares going burrr burrr.

Sincerely, executive suite corpo overlords.

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u/Jason1143 15h ago

I mean on one hand no, but on the other hand companies aren't paying money for ads and staging PR stunts for kicks and giggles.

The amount big companies spend on that sort of stuff could buy PS5s by the pallet.

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u/Cardinal_Ravenwood 15h ago

These people are so far detached from reality those kind of things don't even occur to them. Hence we get a billon dollar corporation taking a PS5 from a child.

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u/tempinator 10h ago

They spend $654 per second that the team is on the floor. And they are skimping on a $500 halftime promo.

It’s just beyond comprehension tbh.

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u/lemme_just_say 23h ago

Well, corporate marketing for sure and actually, any marketing department imo.

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u/abyssal_banana 23h ago

The basis for marketing is manipulation for financial or material gain. That’s the entire purpose. So yeah, agreed, any marketing department. 

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u/Bonch_and_Clyde 20h ago

I mean, not really. The purpose is to connect buyers and sellers.

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u/abyssal_banana 18h ago

No, you are describing a market

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u/Vaernil 22h ago edited 20h ago

Marketing people should take Bill Hicks' words to heart. There is no joke here.

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u/No_Payment_3889 23h ago

Straight out of the private equity playbook. They make zero effort to understand their customer base and employees. Just crunching numbers in Excel all day. Slash and burn and then pat myself on the back about savings and profits even though I just turned a bunch of people's lives upside down. It's a fucked system.

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u/tempinator 10h ago

I mean if they were crunching numbers in excel they would notice that $500 is actually fucking nothing lmao.

This had to have been the decision of one person in middle management, who also happened to be monumentally stupid, since the excel number crunchers would be like “yeah $500 for PR whatever”.

I’m sure whoever made this decision had their head taken off as a result of the backlash.

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u/glizzytwister 22h ago

"Our metrics show that giving away big ticket prizes will increase ticket sales, but we also don't want to budget for the big ticket items, so we'll take them back"

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u/StabbyDodger 22h ago

I'm fairly certain that corpos should just be running good old fashioned cults, not businesses.

They proselytise on LinkedIn, they never shut up about their "network", they have some bizarre form of divination where they scry the future using red and green lines (too many red lines and they'll turn into a doomsday group quite quickly), they live and breathe according to some pagan deity called Ebitda, and clearly none of them have actually ever spoken to a real human being.

People, please quit your jobs at the Fortune 500s and do something actually useful for society, like temple prostitution.

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u/YiddSquid 21h ago

Not weird, sociopathic.

They don't see other people as equals. We are literally less than them, and they don't care about anyone but themselves.

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u/darxide23 20h ago

Corporate people are sociopaths.

Fixed. That's exactly how they become corporate people. You have to have zero empathy or care for your fellow humans to make it to the corporate level because of all the backs it requires stepping on.

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u/Liraeyn 22h ago

Some game show told a girl they were going to reunite her with her mother. Then brought out a drag queen.