Oh, man, I have been seriously short of funds lately. Working security at Rite Aid for $6.55 an hour is just not cutting it the way it used to. But I'm not worried, because last night, as I was standing there staring at the rows of shampoo bottles and disposable razors, the answer hit me: I should start some sort of huge corporation!
Those big companies pull in some serious cash. I'm talking billions and trillions of dollars every year. Even better, those guys don't even have to pay any taxes. They just write it all off as a business expense, and the government doesn't even mind, because it's happy for the jobs they create. It's true. Read the papers.
The question is, what kind of company should I start? Something like Rite Aid would actually be pretty good. That'd be easy money. All they do is take a bunch of products somebody else already made and put them on shelves and charge more for them than they paid. Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Best Buy… shit, all those companies make a ton of dough without actually manufacturing anything themselves!
If I ran this Rite Aid and all the other ones across the country, I could be making money every time someone walked out with a pack of cigarettes. Better yet, I could make even more money by being the company that sells Rite Aid the cigarettes. That's all Philip Morris does, and they pull in, like, $8,000 trillion a year. Pretty sweet gig, huh?
Know what else would be a good thing to start? One of those pharmaceutical companies. They don't make huge things, but they make a ton of money because you get a million people taking expensive little pills and that adds up really fast. All you gotta do is think up one good drug that no one else is making, and you're set. How 'bout Sniffloban, an anti-sneezant? See, I just made that up right there! Now, all I need is to find a scientist to make the pills, write him a check for, oh, $10,000 for his troubles, and my corporation keeps all the profits.
I'm guessing those phone companies do pretty good business, too. There's AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, just to name a few. I'd call mine something that sounds all big and impressive. Like SuperGlobalTelCom. Or maybe something with some of the letters changed, like FoneKorp.
That would definitely work. But to really make big money, you need to find out what people want these days and then do that. For example, you wouldn't want to start a company that makes VHS tapes, because VHS tapes are on the way out. Digital is the future. So I could call my company Digicorp and make digital stuff, like equipment and media stuff and such. That'd be cool.
But how would I know if Digicorp is the right name? I'd get a bunch of people in a room and say, "What do you think the company should be called?" Rule Number One: Get a good name, and you're halfway there. Have you ever heard of TECO Energy, Baker Hughes, or Medtronic? No. Those are weak names, and that's why those companies are at the bottom of the Fortune 500. Now, have you heard of AllState, American Express, and Ford? Of course. These companies are making an assload of money, and a lot of that is due to name recognition.
Speaking of name recognition, ever hear of IBM? How about Apple? Microsoft? Of course you have. That's because they're all high-tech, and high-tech is hot right now. Anything with technology—computers, TVs, surgical equipment—we're talking green machine, baby. Those companies are successful because they keep coming up with new stuff. If you give people something new, something they haven't seen before, they'll want to buy it.
So, Rule Number Two is: Give people something new. Break out of the mold. The first time someone came out with an eye-laser machine, I'm sure people said, "What the fuck? You want to stick a laser in people's eyes? Nobody's gonna want that." But the guy stuck to his guns, and now Lasik is huge. I see ads for them all over the place.
They say it takes money to make money. So anything that has to do with money is probably a pretty good bet. John Hancock Financial, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, Fannie Mae, Citigroup—those are all huge corporations that make giant profits just by moving money around from place to place. You just loan out money to people, and they give it back with interest. Then you have even more money to loan out to other people. Talk about a racket!
I still haven't decided what my corporation will be, but I do know one thing: Whatever it is, I'm going international with it. That's how you really make the serious dough. You get a bunch of factories set up all over the world and start selling your product in 100 or so countries. This is called "expanding into other markets," and it's the easiest way to sell stuff. People in India, for example, will take anything because they're so poor and desperate. A guy in India will buy the shittiest washer-dryer in all of America. Same goes for shitty cars in Russia. Or shitty watches in Thailand. Hell, you can release the world's worst movie, like Armageddon or whatever, in those poor countries, and they'll eat it up, because it's better than whatever they can get there. So you don't have to worry so much about having high standards of quality when you're selling to foreigners, which is nice.
Man, when my company is up and running, it's gonna be so sweet. I'll just sit there and boss everybody around all day from my luxury penthouse office on the top floor of my corporate headquarters. That's definitely gonna beat busting kids for shoplifting Twizzlers.