"Looks like we still need to hire more people! We clearly don't have enough sales staff. Who would have thought we'd run into this situation after the economic crisis broke out?" said the personnel manager of Austria's Hohenzollern Tobacco Company.
As a tobacco giant that had only risen to prominence in recent years, Hohenzollern Tobacco Company was encountering an economic crisis for the first time, so it lacked experience.
"That's right. Market research shows that after the economic crisis broke out, workers faced far greater pressure from unemployment and living costs. The social atmosphere has also grown increasingly gloomy. Uncertainty about the future has greatly increased people's demand for tobacco and alcohol, especially cheap tobacco and liquor, whose sales have surged. As long as we can obtain sufficiently cheap raw materials to produce enough low-priced products, we can make even more money."
"However, we should focus more on setting up sales outlets, especially mobile street stalls, rather than hiring professional salesmen. Smokers don't want someone buzzing in their ears like a fly at a time like this."
"That's true. The social atmosphere is already bad enough. Hiring professional salesmen would probably have the opposite effect."
Salesmen were absolutely the sort of profession that easily provoked disgust. When the economy was doing well and people were more tolerant, that was one thing. But now, with the mood of society as a whole so unstable, salesmen with merely average speaking skills would only stir up conflicts.
After the economic crisis, Austria's Hohenzollern Tobacco Company had been living quite comfortably. Unemployed Austrians, hollow in spirit, showed a clear increase in demand for cigarettes. It was the same with Hechingen's distilleries, especially its cheapest vodka, whose sales had soared.
Before the economic crisis broke out, Hohenzollern Tobacco Company's employees had been quite panicked. Every