"FIRING" the less profitable customers. Has this concept taken hold in practice?

It may be a way to upset the non-targetted customers but the Professor from Harvard Business School points out from the employee point of view

• that it may be another way to express the support to the company employee, and
• keep the company in strategic focus on the profitable segment

The profession points out example of ING Direct, the fastest growing financial service organization in US for the last 7 years. They asked about 10,000 non-profitable customer to go per month, and they preserve the highest customer satisfaction ranking for they 6.5 million of profitable customers.

Extracting from http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5884.html