Digital Home Thoughts: Panasonic Boosting Sales By 'Encouraging' Employees To Buy Their Products

"Its electronic gadgetry is gathering dust on the shelves of high street stores, nobody is buying new fridges and the mountain of unsold plasma televisions is growing by the day. However, in desperation, Panasonic has hit on the perfect counter-attack against the consumer slump: it has ordered every member of staff to go out and buy £1,000 of Panasonic products."

So you're Panasonic, and in rough economic times you're hard pressed to boost profits. So what do you do? Put the squeeze on your employees and "encourage" them to purchase about $1466 USD worth of Panasonic products. Oh, and this is after slashing salaries and bonuses. Having your salary cut is better than losing your job, but for a company to apply pressure to their employees to burn through their savings to purchase company products? That crosses the line into corporate abuse of power.