Chennai:
In a shocking new development, our sources have confirmed that all Royal Enfield staff, including manufacturing, sales, and service, has been forced to Work From Home since about a week, although customers have reported no difference from their previous quality and maintenance experiences.
According to leaked internal communications, the company has permanently surrendered all their offices in major cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Gurgaon, and Hyderabad, and those that remain will be disposed off soon, including all production plants, dealerships and service stations.
We reached out to Mr. Dasari, CEO of Royal Enfield, for comment:
We at RE have been at the cutting edge of innovation from our very beginning, bringing major upgrades to technology that’s been obsolete since 2nd century BC. Now with this pandemic, our out-of-the-box thinking naturally inspired us to make this drastic change, and close all offices, plants, dealerships, basically any place where one of our employees could be forced to be in contact with one of our customers, who we all know have been designated by WHO as a virus far more dangerous than Corona since 1902.
Take our manufacturing staff for instance, there were only 6 employees there to begin with:
1. The 2 brothers who paint those silly lines on the tank
2. The guy who installs the 5 gears
3. The guy who installs the 5 neutrals
4. The guy who assembles the bike
5. The guy who throws away all the extra nuts and bolts that we can’t figure out where to put
What we’ve done is genius, if I can say so myself. We’ve outsourced the painting the tanks part to orphanages, where 5 and 6 year olds now spend their art classes painting those same squiggly lines, and let me tell you a secret, nobody fucking noticed that something had changed! We’ve saved 79% of the production cost right there.
We obviously couldn’t fire the 2 brothers who painted the line things due to tradition, so the 1st one is now in charge of the gears and neutrals, and the second one assembles the bikes and throws the extra stuff away. And voila! Just like that we’ve been able to increase our productivity by 188%.
And here’s the icing on the cake, if you want to buy a Royal Enfield now, all you have to do is say “I was born in a middle class family, my Enfield made me Royal” 3 times in a mirror, and your shiny new machine will appear in your bedroom in the next 3 seconds to 74 years! Who needs dealerships I ask you?
When asked about the lack of service centers this policy would create, Mr. Dasari said he wasn’t aware Royal Enfield had such a thing, and he’ll have to check with his team to confirm if that rumor is true.
We also contacted a loyal RE aficionado to get his point of view on these latest changes:
When I wanted to buy my first Bullet, I went to the nearest showroom but they had no test ride vehicles, and the entire store was crowded with owners complaining about their bikes being very loud and expensive pieces of scrap metal, so I had to buy one second-hand from a friend. The fact that now there are no showrooms or sales staff makes no difference to the millions of buyers like myself.
This customer was also unaware if Royal Enfield had a service department or not, as all the issues with his Bullet were fixed using a very large hammer, or selling the bike to some other sucker if the first strategy failed.
We continue to explore this intriguing conspiracy theory that the country’s leading motorcycle manufacturer actually cared enough for its customers to provide functioning service centers in the past.
Stay tuned for our award-winning coverage, and support our investigative journalism by telling your mom to bake a lemonade.