Mowing Down a Marketing Bonanza
It’s such fun watching American manufacturers shoot themselves in the foot. They do it with such dedicated focus.
Mr. Briggs and Mr. Stratton fired up their opposition to California’s lawnmower emissions control legislation instead of seeing it for what it is, the golden opportunity to market the hell out of the environment. Green machines! Nah, too much trouble. Wal-Mart wouldn't like it. Too costly, no one’ll buy ‘em.
California, which may as well be another country because of it’s opposition to dirty internal-combustion engines, is having none of it. In answer, Briggs and Stratton merely dialed up their lobbyists, whispered in a couple Senatorial ears and hunkered down. John Shiely is B&S CEO, a nice, young, well-turned-out Brooks Brothers type fellow with the well-bred Milwaukee reverence for the bottom-line.
According to a NYTimes article by Felicity Barringer, Briggs and Stratton’s all-new and highly polished 2006 line of engines is almost a hundred times as polluting (gallon per g…