I have watched Europe and their distribution methods for a long time now and I still don't get them. They are leaving so much money on the table that when the shit hits the fan, and their sales plummet, they will wish they had paid attention to getting product to the U.S.
I come from a sales background. There was no such thing as holding inventory back for any reason at all. If the thing was made, then it was supposed to be sold for as high a price as you could get. Simple supply and demand and yet Europe seems to have ignored this concept for decades. I see popular brands discontinued from European houses, never to be made again. I see the most popular brands with the worst supply lines.
Maybe this is a good example. In 1984 Dodge Motors came out with the dodge Caravan. No one had ever seen anything like it and the demand was crazy. The car came with a price listed on it, but we jacked that price up 1500.00 just because we could and people bought them that way.
Compare that with say Esoterica. They allegedly have only 6 employees and only make so much product till the next run. My brain cannot comprehend how they did not hire loads more people, buy more tobacco to make their popular blends and then sell all they could make. I guess this is why America's GDP is higher than all the other countries combined and that California has the 4th highest GDP in the world. Is it as simple as the Europeans just want their 4 day work weeks and 2 month summer vacations and us Americans are workaholics who want to make as much money as we can?
Yes I had my 55-65 hours a week in the car business and my 100 hour plus weeks when I opened my own businesses. And the Europeans still get free health care and we get squat, what a world. I will still take my workaholic ass over any other systems as I can make as much money as I am willing to work for.
There are some reasons I can think of. Maybe they're not the right reasons, and maybe they're not good reasons, depending on your perspective, but I can imagine some.
In the United States it seems that making money is the alter on which all else is sacrificed. Not a judgement, just an observation. The attitude in Europe is slightly different, although making money is still important.
For example, I work for a small games studio in Stockholm. And they are explicitly trying to stay small, even though we have been enjoying a few successful releases back-to-back and hiring new people. The policy is that if we ever get too big and successful, we're going to break up the company into two smaller, independent studios.
Why? Because there's such a thing as too big. And also, believe it or not, too much money. The bigger and richer the company, the more generic, cautious the product. But that's not all. It's also usually a less fun place to work (and life quality is just as, if not more, important than financial success - what's the point of making stacks of cash if you were comfortable and happier before?), and lastly, waste goes through the roof.
For example, in my previous job (also a games studio, but a huge, rich, ultra-successful one), there was entire department of people who basically walked around with a cup of coffee, made power-point slides and had "important sounding" discussions using a lot of marketing and industry buzz-words around the water-cooler.
I have absolutely no idea what these people did. But we have zero of them, let alone an entire department, in my new job, and I have noticed zero difference in the quality of our product. God knows what it cost to pay them all to stand around and look important. I was once flown across the country and put up in a 4-star hotel in order to attend a meeting where I was asked one question to which my answer was, "yes". That could have been a 5-second phone call or even a phone message.
You might say (and you might be right), "well, they just got big in the wrong way". Sure. But in my experience, companies over a certain size tend to have a mind of their own and they always go that way. Too many cooks spoil the broth.
The product was also far more bland, generic, risk-averse, politically-correct and less fun.
Working there was more rigid, less free, less fun, more suffocated with bureaucracy and superfluous opinions.
And that is not the only example. That pretty much described every large company I worked for in every country (I've worked in three different ones).
Does this translate to tobacco production? Maybe. Maybe not. Is there a better way to do it? Maybe.
Long story short: I can see why some people are willing to sacrifice making more money for other benefits.
