I am so disappointed by the emerging snapshot of ethics in America.  When I first entered this business, stuff like the peanut/salmonella situation did not happen.  Period.  Enron?  Nada.  In fact during my career, I have experienced or known about very few violations of ethics by business, but it does happen, and unfortunately we have run into it.

Our firm resigned a very big client about fifteen years ago because we learned that a screw machine in a mixer had been out of registration and had left small metal shavings in literally millions of cookies.  The CEO had the finance department estimate the least expensive course of action, recall or reimbursement of dental and medical expenses from consumers who developed problems from eating the cookies.

The CEO and finance and sales went with reimbursement over the objections of marketing, thereby guaranteeing that many of their brand users would get sick, and that the problem would be skewed towards their heavy users.

We resigned the client on the spot, because of 1) ethics and 2) stupidity.  At the time this was one of the two biggest brand names in cookies.  I don’t know that the word ever got out over this incident.  I don’t know how many problems were caused or what the amount of reimbursements were paid out.   But the particular brand, Keebler is no longer such a big name in cookies.

There has never been a dollar created that was more important to make than it is to keep a customer.  Profit is never more important than people.