Channel stuffing is the business practice where a company, or a sales force within a company, inflates its sales figures by forcing more products through a distribution channel than the channel is capable of selling to the world at large.
Alternatively, it can be a consequence of a poorly managed
sales force attempting to meet short term objectives and quotas in a way
that is detrimental to the company in the long term.
THE WORLDS UNSOLD CAR STOCKPILE
Houston...We have a problem!...Nobody is buying brand new cars
anymore! Well they are, but not on the scale they once were. Millions
of brand new unsold cars are just sitting redundant on runways and car
parks around the world. There, they stay, slowly deteriorating without
being maintained.
Below is an image of a massive car park at Swindon, United Kingdom,
with thousands upon thousands of unsold cars just sitting there with not
a buyer in sight. The car manufacturers have to buy more and more land
just to park their cars as they perpetually roll off the production
line.
There is proof that the worlds recession is still biting and wont let
go. All around the world there are huge stockpiles of unsold cars and
they are being added to every day. They have run out of space to park
all of these brand new unsold cars and are having to buy acres and acres
of land to store them.
Its hard to believe that there are so many unsold cars in the
world but its true. The worse part is that the amount of unsold cars
keeps on getting bigger every day.
The car industry would never sell these cars at massive reductions in
their prices to get rid of them, no they still want every buck. If
they were to price these cars for a couple of thousand they would sell
them. However, nobody would then buy any expensive cars and then they
would end up being unsold. Its quite a pickle we have gotten ourselves
into.
The car industry cannot stop making new cars because they would have
to close their factories and lay off tens of thousands of employees.
This would further add to the recession. Also the domino effect would
be catastrophic as steel manufactures would not sell their steel. All
the tens of thousands of places where car components are made would also
be effected, indeed the world could come to a grinding halt.
Below is shown just a small area of a gigantic car park in Spain where tens of thousands of cars just sit and sunbathe all day.
Tens of thousands of cars are still being made every week but hardly
any of them are being sold. Nearly every household in developed
countries already has a car or even two or three cars parked up on their
driveway as it is.
Below is an image of thousands upon thousands of unsold cars parked
up on a runway near St Petersburg in Russia. They are all imported from
Europe, they are all then parked up and they are all then left to rot.
Consequently, the airport is now unusable for its original purpose.
The cycle of buying, using, buying using has been broken, it is now
just a case of "using" with no buying.
It is a sorry state of affairs and there is no answer to it,
solutions don't exist. So the cars just keep on being manufactured and
keep on adding to the millions of unsold cars already sitting redundant
around the world.
As it is, there are more cars than there are people on the planet
with an estimated 10 billion roadworthy cars in the world today.
We literally cannot make enough of them. Below are seen just a few of
the thousands of Citroen's parked up at Corby, Northamptonshire in
England. They are being added to daily, imported from France but with
nowhere else to go once they arrive.
So there they sit, brand spanking new cars, all with a couple of
miles on the clock that was consummate with them being driven to their
car parks.
Manufacturing more cars than can be sold is against all logic,
logistics and economics but it continues day after day, week after week,
month after month, year in year out.
All around the world these cars just keep on piling up, there is no
end in sight. The economy shouts out quite loud that nobody has the
money anymore to spend on a new car. The reason being that they are
making their "old" cars go on a lot longer. But we cannot stop making
them, soon we will run out of space to park them. We are nearly running
out of space to drive them that's for sure!
Below, more cars mount up in the port of Valencia in Spain. They will
not be exported as there is nowhere for them to go, so they just sit
and rot in their colorful droves.
Gone are the days when the family would have a new car every year,
they are now keeping what they have got. It may be fair to say that
some families still get a new car every year but its the majority that
now do not.
The results are in these images, hundreds of thousands if not
millions of cars around the world are driven from their factories,
parked up and left.
Could we say that these cars have been left to rot! Maybe, as these
cars will certainly rot if they are not bought, driven and cared for.
It does not look like they will be sold any day soon, many of them have
been standing for over 12 months or even longer and this is detrimental
to the car.
Below, as far as the eye can see, right into the background, cars,
cars and more cars. But what's beyond the horizon? Have a guess...Yes
that's right...even more cars! All brand new but with no homes to go
to. Do you think they will ever start giving them away, that may be the
only radical solution. Who knows, you could soon be getting a free car
with every packet of cornflakes.
When a car is left standing idle, all the oil sinks to the bottom of
the sump, and then corrosion begins to set in on all the internal engine
parts where the oil has drained away.
Cold corrosion is when condensation builds up in the cylinders and
rust forms in the bores. The engines would then start to seize and would
need to be professionally freed before they could be started. Also the
tires start to lose air and the batteries start to go flat, indeed the
detrimental list goes on and on.
The epidemic is not improving, it is getting worse. Car
manufactureres are constantly coming out with new models with the latest
technology in them. Hence prospective buyers of, for example, a new
Citroen Xsara Picasso want the latest model, not last years model.
Hence all the unsold Citroen Xsara Picasso cars from the previous year
will now have even lesser chance of being sold.
The problems then just keep on mounting up. In the end, the unsold
cars that are say 2 years old will have no alternative but to be either
crushed up, dismantled and/or their parts recycled.
Some car manufacturers moved their production over to China, General
Motors and Cadillac are examples of this. They are then shipped over in
containers and unloaded at ports. However they are now being told to
put a big halt in their import into the U.S.A. as they just can't sell
them in the quantities they would desire. Consequently Chinese car
parks are now filling up with brand new American cars. Well nobody in
China can afford them on their meagre pittance wages, so there they will
stay until our economy improves...which it might do in a few
generations.
