There’s always been mis-selling. Unscrupulous, or incompetent, people have been selling the wrong stuff to the wrong people, in the wrong way since the beginning of time. But recent history has revealed the malpractice on a scale previously unimaginable. So much so, the word mis-selling has become common in our language.
Whereas before people just thought to themselves “he would say that, he’s a salesman”, now they associate the very word mis-selling with a collapse in the integrity of institutions. Brands which had gold star reputations before have been exposed as covers for lying, cheating, and stealing.
It’s not just the rogue sales guy anymore. The companies have been contaminated by exposure in the media, mostly resulting from rulings by regulatory authorities and even the courts. Banks are now recognised as vehicles for chancers to gamble customers hard earned money, with the profits being harvested by the few while governments, aka the rest of the population, picking up the losses. A pharmaceuticals company has been exposed as persuading doctors to prescribe the wrong drugs, to children. Pillars of society have been shown up as the self serving monsters they are.
They may not be interested in the detail, but everybody now knows the collapse in trust. And now everybody selling anything will need to work doubly hard, because nobody trusts anybody anymore.
