They better not touch my salary when these VPs are making so much doing nothing.
21 replies (most recent on top)
BIO for follett core-pos leader / board member on retailtouchpoints dot com. Stores using core.
P is Director IT, Store Systems for Follett Corporation. He is responsible for store systems group that supports 1,200 college book stores across United States and Canada. P lead POS teams to be the first retailer in the world to implement Oracle POS Version 14. He launched Mobile POS solution for line busting, consultative selling, endless aisles, and pop-up stores.
In regards to BS's 2013 news letter:
Retalon - was a disaster, screwed up inventory in stores, gone
CorePOS - gone? Don't even know what this was suppose to be
CT Web - soooo slow, have to wait forever for it to load, lots of fun putting adoptions, not sure what the benefits are. Can't use it on more than 2 work stations before it goes funky.
Lots of successes, sales going further down
Look at the bright side that is probably 500k in salary savings for those two guys, although I am sure replacements are on their way.
BS - one more time with feeling
===============================================
November 14, 2013
How to lay off 600 booksellers: with a delicious dollop of horseshit
by Dustin Kurtz
That new memo from HQ is … nearly … ready.
Say you run a huge corporation, with $2.7 billion in annual revenue. Say, too, that a major part of your empire is a series of college bookstores—over eight hundred of them. Say, as long as we’re imagining things, that you, a ruthless and beautiful corporate overlord, think of human beings as capital, think the public are dupes, and need to get some expenses off of your ledger by Q1 at the latest if you’re going to justify that bonus.
What do you do? Well my friend, let me introduce you to a little thing we in the business world like to call “horseshit.”
Let’s use the Follett Higher Educational Group as an example. They’re actually a pretty good case study because their parent company, the Follett Group, does have yearly revenues of $2.7 billion. They do have about 980 college stores, and they did just lay off 570 full time booksellers at 400 of those stores last Friday.
As Shelf Awareness and PW‘s Claire Kirch report, a memo by Bob Scholl, Follett’s VP for retail operations, was circulated to all six thousand employees in the Higher Educational Group. In it, Scholl lays out the reasons for the drastic cuts. He writes:
“We are adjusting our store staffing model to put more hours on the sales floor whenever students are shopping most. This involves shifting our ratio of full-time hourly and part-time store positions, and following scheduling practices to ensure our stores are always staffed at the busiest times. This shift gives us more scheduling flexibility each day, week and year. The result will be more customer-facing labor hours in our campus stores, generating more selling opportunities with increased customer satisfaction.”
The layoff, he writes,
“is part of Follett’s much broader and comprehensive transformation, which is reflected in the fact that we’ve invested more than $200 million in technology, distribution, digital content and ecommerce over the last three years alone. These investments in CorePOS, retalon, CT Web are creating more efficiency at the store level, allowing us to deliver even more hours of store service and support when students and faculty expect it.”
The change will, Scholl writes (and this is my favorite part) “deliver the hassle-free shopping experience that our customers expect.”
If you are looking for a model of how best to feed people some steaming fresh horseshit, you could not possibly do better than this. The secret to good horseshit, you see, is that you want it to taste like horse colon, yes, but with a spicy hint of disdain. Horseshit is never meant to fool anyone. It exists purely for its own sake, more as an exercise in aesthetics than anything, a sort of wet, hay-thickened amuse bouche. Horseshit is not a lie, it is a gift; in place of a lie, the acknowledgement that you don’t even owe your victims an explanation that approaches the truth. It’s all much better this way. You can feel magnanimous, and the folks taking big bites of your horse apples can really savor that scorn while they pack their things and hit the street.
The true reasons behind the layout might go as follows (though of course Scholl’s particularly piquant horeshit stands apart from such things):
-
Lose the benefits. Follett is cutting full timers and even if, as PW reports, those folks are being offered part time jobs, those jobs won’t come with health insurance. That is a significant saving to the company.
-
Lose seniority. This is the Circuit City model of retail. If you have a class of experienced, caring employees who’ve earned a few promotions, cut those folks loose first. It’s not as if a bookseller or electronics clerk needs to know anything, right? Rehire them at part time if you must, but with no accumulated seniority.
-
Lose ballast. Scholl was not lying when he emphasized Follett’s pivot toward their educational software and digital branches. Laying off booksellers frees up some payroll money, and apparently selling books is a s---er’s game. And perhaps they are dodging the folks at Chegg, the textbook rental company that had the dubious honor of being the first tech industry IPO on wall street after Twitter last week. If Follett can lock down enough institutional clients, it’ll cushion them against competition in the textbook market. Follett, you’ll remember, even started a VC fund to help them develop just this kind of software.
Who will cushion the nearly six hundred full time booksellers who’ve just been let go? Are they, as anonymous commenters are attesting on thelayoff.com, being forced to sign away their right to unemployment insurance? Is this a move to dump these people onto the newly formed ACTA market?
Well, here, shh, enough questions. Chew on this succulent bit of horseshit for a while and just think of how ‘hassle-free’ these bookstores will be once they are empty wastelands, strewn with soap caddies and sleeves of ping pong balls, with few books and even fewer booksellers to be found.
BS was way overdue to leave. Stole a few more years of pay so props to him for that. He really never accomplished much in his last role and tried way to hard to fit in with the new regime that it was comical at times. I'll be happy with that clown CW leaves. Another one stealing money and not doing anything. Should have been gone with DG.
Like nothing
If this is the big announcement, big deal. Don't think it will effect much.
Did he leave on his own? Interesting. See something the wall & got out.
Like school but spelled differently?
BS is gone
BS is out.
And seriously how is this going to change anything? Sales will continue to go down, stores will be told to do more with no incentives.
Corp Controller AD is leaving. Gave his notice.
Tell me more
Vp change where JL is no longer over the warehouses and GD, from BT, is the VP now
Yea yea yea heard this before
What VPS change?
More people have been let go.
AP area.
We already know about the VP change
Here we go again. Didn't we have this same post a few days ago....