I thought I would be overjoyed the day I gave notice, however, I've worked here long enough that I was a bit caught up in both the sadness and nostalgia for this place.
Did everything have to be like this?
Would the situation be this bad if the pandemic had not happened, or had the pandemic only accelerated what was inevitable?
15 years here....the pandemic just sped up the inevitable. after they brought in MT and all the corporate stooges around him, they've eliminated everything that made the company different from other big box retailers. take away the personal touch store managers could put on inventory, take away the variety of different brands and replace them all with low quality cr-p at the same price, you ki---d what kept us going. oh, and they can talk about connecting with the customers all they want, but when there's one cashier and one keyholder as the lone coverage for an entire store, there's no one there to connect with.
What I don’t understand is why can’t they just look at the numbers and see that sure 5 or 6 years ago we had our problems but the sales were there. We couldn’t have been doing it all wrong. Now it’s so complicated just to get through the day. Things were simple back then and we were able to do what we knew would make our store great. They just need to stop trying to fix something that wasn’t all that broke.
I loved the past as well as it was more family operated and everyone at each level seemed to care more about us in the stores. But I do wonder if that had anything to do with where we are today. A business our size being run like family couldn't be sustained forever.
Been here for about 8+ years and I also get nostalgic from how the company was about 5-6 years ago and how everything used to run so smoothly and we would have a ton of great people working with us, now it’s all running on fumes at this point. But to answer your question I believe the pandemic accelerated things considerably but you could see the company changing considerably in mid-2019 and making changes that just didn’t make much sense.