This nice headline was coined by the New York Post and Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank. Basically, a lot of very large retailers have learned the hard lesson that not everyone thinks like you do.
This is a hard concept to get across to people. If you were a republican legislator in Indiana and you think that everyone in your state will support your anti-abortion views when you took away their right to choose, you were in for a bit of a shock. Same for Bud Light’s comical self-own. Sales are down 25%? Because not everyone thinks like their marketing team.
Not everyone thinks like you do or read the room is a notion that lawyers have to convey to clients all the time. People think that everyone lives like they do because often people similar to themselves are who they spend time with. Here is an example, a client’s story began that she was coming back from her house in Stone Harbor, down the shore and was in a bad car accident. This was a house that she owned, that was easily googled, and well over a million dollars. After the deposition, the defense lawyer’s memory of the case consisted of “beach house, Stone Harbor.” The client did not think that her case was worth less because of her apparent wealth. The client was used to getting her way on most things involving money and negotiation, but it took a lot of work for the client to accept that jurors were going to be less willing to award her substantial money if she plainly did not need the money. Eventually, a mediator settled the case with both sides, but it took the mediator a bit of work to explain that the beach house was coming into evidence.
We could have filed Motions in limine to keep the beach house out of evidence, but it played a role in the lead up to the crash and while clearly not relevant to me, it would have been a judgment call by a judge as to whether the beach house would be admissible. I don’t want to learn just before jury selection that the defense lawyer will be standing up shortly and saying Stone Harbor Beach Mansion in her opening statement.