My first job was at a store that sold surplus electronic components and electronics tools, things like resistors and capacitors, wire nippers, solder suckers, that sort of thing. The person running the place was a total bastard and we knew things were going wrong with the company due to his incompetence.
This was before the days of govt. subsidized ecycle programs and whatnot, so our stock wasn't collected locally, they got it Elsewhere and sent a van up every week to bring us new product. Except that as things got worse, the van came less, and eventually didn't come at all.
We weren't certain that we were all about to lose our jobs until the day we received "new stock", in the form of several boxes of Bazic brand office supplies. Post-its, notepads, pens, etc., every bit of it literal, actual-fraud garbage. It simply didn't work.
The paper would tear in half when you tried to pull it off the notepad. The pens didn't fucking write, they just didn't. The markers smelled like carcinogens. And the post-its were so bad that I actually felt sick looking at or touching them - just knowing that someone, somewhere, was willing to make this literal trash made me so crushingly sad and nauseous.
They came in eye-searingly bright colors, and the adhesive was at once too strong and incredibly weak. The act of peeling them off the pad put a curl into the paper that only got worse. They would continue curling until they pulled themselves off of whatever surface you stuck them to, and they didn't accept ink. They were clearly the wrong kind of paper, because that's where shit like this comes from. It's some companys garbage that some other company realized could stand in for a legitimate product just long enough to make the sale, and then they could disappear into the woodwork.
The management ignored our desperate complaints that this made no sense, that nobody would ever buy any of this, and even if they did, the damage to our reputation would be irreparable. They made us replace a whole aisle with it - an aisle they had not bothered to stock for six months. Nobody ever bought a single item out of that aisle.
A year later, if that, the store was closed. Ten years later, and two states away, I knew the end was coming for Fry's Electronics the day I walked in and saw an entire aisle of Bazic brand office supplies, including sticky notes in neon yellow and green.
