Several years ago, I was working for a company that was trying to secure a round of venture financing. The folks they were talking to said that they wouldn't give them the financing unless they laid off all of the engineering team and devoted all of the capital to sales and marketing. It has never made sense to me that they wanted to get rid of engineering because, without engineering, you have no product to sell so why would you need sales and marketing?
Companies spend millions of dollars on marketing – the recent Superbowl blitz has proven this out with the $6.5M price tag for a 30-second spot. They'll also spend millions of dollars trying to keep employees from unionizing and filing lawsuits to keep them from changing jobs. All this while making billions of dollars in profit off the backs of employees that they will pay the absolute least amount to.
I don't know where this all started or why it continues. Spend millions/billions trying to market crappy products to people and then more millions/billions to defend against lawsuits rising from those crappy products or to prevent employees from unionizing when they could use those millions/billions to provide a living wage to employees who would then make an effort not to produce crappy products.
If you have 100 employees, $1M would be enough to raise all of their salaries by $5 an hour. That $6.5M 30-second spot would give a $5/hr raise to 650 employees. Corporations will pay the $6.5M without blinking an eye but will fight tooth and nail to keep employees from getting it.
I don't know why I felt compelled to post about this. I just cannot understand the mindset of using money that way.