are sales reps smarter than a high school student?

This has been a trend that has been picking up that I have been noticing and tracking for a few years now. It has always existed but with new Internet trends and the competition with big online retailers (there are some good online businesses but im more talking about the BIG ones) dragging things down by "dumbing" down the process...
And operating on # of orders over profitibility on orders... the mentality has shifted from learning skills and training how to manage clients artwork and expectations to learning how to sell more orders quicker to make up the difference.

Simply put the paper pushers are leveraging quick sales using tighter margins and no oversight into the actual work or process... They are handing it off cause they don't make enough money on that one order to justify spending any more time or money on it and move to the next order. (when your selling 24 shirts that retail for $14.95 with standard markup, then add a 10K stitch logo that you contract the order out and only charge $16-17... spending any more time than "take money/place orders/give items" becomes a loss.)

I mean I know how to put in competitive bids but the level of margin some people are taking are ridiculous... Ive seen the invoices on some...

The flip side is that the lower quality of work that you get from cheap/low quality digitizers has also come to be seen as passable by so many that they manage to get away with it more often than they don't.

But that has been my take on the whole thing with the bulk of local competition... there is only one other competitor within 15 miles that actually make an effort to understand before they sell.

I have looked into both of those as well.
For some reason my local area is highly saturated with these smaller paper pushers or minimum overhead... out of garage businesses... As well as customers who would rather spend their time putting businesses up against each other to under bid the other just to save a dollar an item.

Their profit margins are generally around 15-30% margin at best INCLUDING APPAREL. But due to the lack of overhead they can maintain it... or if they go bust the ease of creating accounts and websites there is always someone new. The internet has only compounded the speed at which these businesses pop up and go down in the last 2-3 years with all the API websites that allow anyone to set up a site. And Cross compare.

Because of the lack of knowledge on the paper pusher side or even the cheap out of house people you end up even getting that kind of thing even on the contract side of things you get people trying to put business against business to squeak out an extra dollar. And the willingness to jump ship at a moments notice...

Eventually you get people who are after high quality but often times people will jump from cheap business to cheap business... because they can't conceive of the idea that "if I want good quality I have to pay for it." but that is my personal experience from the local area.

And due to turnover or restructuring of businesses who have the kind of money to spend on volume... You often get a new person is in charge who starts going "I need to prove I can save money or do it better..." Or has a friend of a friend in the industry who they can have underbid after going to the primary source spending 4 hours with them then taking their quote and going elsewhere with it to underbid. (had that happen just today after a week of helping a client)

I think the constant devaluation of clothing continues to hurt the apparel industry. It seems that most clothing is on sale from just before Thanksgiving into January often with a different sale price depending on the day. I love taking advantage of sale pricing for my personal purchases but it seems like the public now expects to buy almost all apparel on sale and if item is embroidered that shouldn't add must to the cost. The value of having a CUSTOM logo on a piece of apparel, a form of portable advertising, has been lost along with the general value of clothing.