bean counters
John, well of course, we have to have "bean counters!", ha. That goes without saying. At least we need them, to a degree. Oftentimes, they wrestle more control than need be and do more harm them good... when pleasing the stockholder is their number one priority. If we didn't have them then every engineer would build their appliances like a metal armored tank with every conceivable option.
Engineers go into the field of engineering because they like to design, and create. In school we were drilled in parameters such redundancy, safety factor, quality and accountability. Descriptors you aren't likely to encounter on the business card of a "bean counter."
When administration interferes and tells the engineer not to over-design, but to under-design, and when an engineer's design is tampered with, it does not go over well.
Engineers vs. management is a historic battleground. Engineers are possesive of their design. that is their baby. When administration interferes, you can guess who wins, the ones who hold the purse strings.
In the casse of Westinghouse, they had some fine engineers and some very creative innovations. The entire Westinghouse Corporation ran into financial woes in the early seventies when Westinghouse's Nuclear Division defaulted on supplying Uranium fuel to it's customers at the contractual price that was promised.
Basically, Westinghouse said if you buy one of our reactors, we will promise to deliver Uranium fuel for the plant at this given price for X many years. the price is locked in and you will never see an increase. Naturally, many utilities jumped at this. General Electric was not offering such a customer friendly perk.
When the raw Uranium prices went up, Westinghouse defaulted on their promises and no longer would supply fuel at the contractual price. Lawsuits hit Westinghouse from right and left and the financial losses from the Nuclear Division put the company in a desperate situation. Cuts were made in virtually all divisions, and many divisions were sold off in turn for readily available cash.
The Appliance Division had become an unwanted stepchild to Westinghouse and it, perhaps, was make to suffer more from the transgressions of its sibling Nuclear Division, than it should have been. At least they kept it.
Product quality, in many cases was compromised, to a degree, by cost cuttings savings.
To add to their problems, Westinghouse was sued by the U.S. Government for price gouging for military electrical supplies.
As mentioned before, Westinghouse was still not wanting to eliminate their appliance division, At the bequest of the Appliance Division's management $73 million was appropriated to the appliance division. Westinghouse told upper management this was necessary to modernize, and in return the Appliance Division would become more competitive and a greater supplier of profit to the ailing corporation.
Wall Street had not liked Westinghouse Appliance Division's meager additions to the overall profit of the company. Just two years earlier, Westinghouse had sold it's underperforming small appliance division, in 1972, to Scovill. Now Wall Street was clamoring Westinghouse to rid itself of its Major Appliance Division to infuse money into the corporation.
Finally, in December they did just that because of the sharp drop in corporate share prices, when Westinghouse announced the investment in their Major Appliance Division, in the previous July.
Westinghouse Appliances did see cost cutting measures in the early seventies when the Corporation was bleeding money. Trust me, the engineers did not dummy down their appliances willingly. You do what is told of you, because you have to feed your family. I am sure their engineers had choice words of anger about management when they began handing down mandates for cost cutting of designs.
They did what they were told to do. Even so, their appliances were not junk, by any means. But they were designed, per administrations mandate, that every available cost-cutting measure be taken.
It's a moot point now, of course. Westinghouse has gone, fading away in the shadow of GE's disappearing tail lights. In my opinion, they didn't use the marketing expertise nor the fined tuned distribution system that GE had at the time.
Their advertising and sponsoring of appropriate television shows, in the fities and sixties was certainly good. They were a primary sponsor of shows of the like of "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour" and the "Nannette Fabray Show." Their chosen spokesperson,Betty Furness, was a believable and could sell snow-cones to an Eskimo.
I think they went south when they replaced Betty with Frank Gifford. Yes, Frank was a well known name in the sports world, but I was watching some of his Westinghouse ads on You-Tube a while back, and he just didn't quite cut it as an appliannce sales man.
You believed Betty and her presentation of Westinghouse's appliance virtues. I was watching Frank trying to sell a dishwasher. He looked like he would rather not be there and was reading a script because he was forced to.
Yes, he read the words and went through the motions the director told him, but you can't lie to a camera, and he still looked like a football player being forced to talk about something that he had no clue on how it worked, and he had not even the slightest interest in.
I am sure the ladies watching the ad were delighted by his looks, but I don't think he convinced them to go out and buy a Westinghouse appliance, ha. That wasn't what they were thinking when they watched him, no doubt.
I have a soft-spot for Westinghouse, as well. At one time they were innovative, stylish and had good quality and some of the most creative engineers in the business. Westinghouse is gone with the Wind, as is most of General Electric, GM's Frigidaire, Ford's Philco and Nash's Kelvinator and a host of others.
At least we can collect what remains of these appliances, preserve them and look to them as a reminder of the days when the world was a little bit different place.[this post was last edited: 9/19/2023-23:16]
