Funny, threre are Office Depot managers on up who who think they will have jobs after the buyout. Guess they didn't do their homework on Staples lol.
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Please note. Almost all of the Depot/Max head honchos are new to the office supply world. After the merger "of equals" most were given large sums to leave the new company. The amount added up to the majority of $1b of "one time merger costs". Many of the $80k managers received $250,000. Those over $100,000 received close to $500,000. Staples buying OD/OM is a little different. There has been almost no thought to converting OD or OM big boxes into Staples stores. Cost wise: it is better to shutter the other brands. Just the cost of new signage to convert a store is close to $45,000. Then add in fixtures, security, sku mergers, infrastructure, distribution, inventory, delivery, uniforms, rf guns, as/400 adoption, payroll alignment, registers, banking, copy center equipment that was only allowed to be leased to one company, phone systems, ...forget about it. 1/3 of OM stores now do under $3M. Their profit is literally under the cost to convert the light up sign on the side of the building.
Jajaa there both sinking ships.
Either way, both companies will be shadows of their former selves in five years, if anything at all remains, buy out or not. It is going to get worse at both companies, not better.
I honestly don't know how secure I would feel being employed by either company right now unless I was in a senior executive level position and had a degree of control over deciding going forward which categories of employees were to be fired and which weren't. Should the FTC approve the Staples/Depot merger, it's hard to see a scenario where substantial amounts of layoffs (beyond what both companies are doing right now as separate businesses already) aren't part of the merger restructuring.
I can see Staples keeping a good portion of the OD home office people, because, you know, you just can't have to many non customer facing, redundant positions in Framingham than there already are. On top of that, Staples has been going on firing sprees in stores. I know several stores in my area that do not have a GM or SM, or both.
There is a good chance that they may keep some of the lower paid OD managers to fill these spots.