It's obvious Follett will not remain standing for much longer, not with the incompetent management we have. But how long do you think we have, realistically, before we turn into the next Sears? My personal opinion is that the company will be liquidated within the next five years at the most.
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Follett is already the new Sears:
- Poor ecommerce implementation (compare the customer experience on efollett to Amazon).
- Unappealing stores (so much GM shipped some stores have had aisles blocked by cr-p still in boxes)
- Cut backs in customer service (lack of staff with attempt to compensate in busy (I.E. MONEY MAKING) seasons with poorly trained inexperienced temps)
- Trying to cut their way out of a hole instead of expanding business.
- Not being where the customer is (todays college students are on their cell phones, so we're pushing email collection so we can sell their info instead of using push ads through an app that doesn't exist.)
- Pushing what the company wants them to buy instead of what the customer wants (if we cut back on QTC they'll have to buy ebooks, right? It's not like they can find them on Amazon or Chegg or...)
- Inability to compete on price.
- Supplier issues (how many publishers were we on credit hold with last buying cycle? When you can't order from a major supplier like Oxford that's an issue.)
He-l, Follett isn't even Sears, it's K-Mart.
"unless you think all colleges and universities do not want a campus store"
Of course they do -- but Follett is not the only option for campuses to select from...They can look elsewhere if Follett is not meeting service expectations.
The company is new, not the old Follett. It isn't going anywhere, unless you think all colleges and universities do not want a campus store, and I don't see that happening. They need to shift the focus to GM, be WAY better at Guaranteed Sales, move textbooks out of the stores and ship from a warehouse, ACCESS, or digital. Stores with huge financial aid for Course materials will stay strong, as long as FA continues on their campus, otherwise, nobody is going to be coming in to the stores to get books, or at least not to the level that makes sense to have that money tied up in the inventory.
But they did actually sell the company (as well as FSS and B and T) so maybe there was reason to be concerned, and they were kind of right after all.
I do see them making a lot of stores virtual, and then those will die off within a year or two. If you can do CM virtually (which is in the plans) and the store doesn’t sell a lot of GM, it would be easy!
If you were forced to take a pay cut or demotion, you are not out of the woods yet.
People have been on this very website for the past 10 years saying Follett only has 5 years left. Take that as you will.
JRC does seem to be flailing around - hiring executives that will have the magic sauce to fix their bad investment. I give the Follett Family credit for dumping a dying business into the hands of an arrogant investment group.
The death of Follett has been predicted for years so who knows. It certainly isn't a growing enterprise. With the new owners move to deplete their human capital at the customer facing source of income I see the death spiral increasing not slowing.