Thread regarding Office Depot layoffs

Office Depot made a big mistake buying Compucom. These new executives that came in after the failed Staples merger tried to BS us all on corp campus by having ice cream, cupcakes, party in the auditorium, invited to a local bar where my EVP bought us drinks. I worked here for 19 years, 8 months and 9 days. Shy of my 20th anniversary. We the layoffs happen, they don't look at performance. They look at if they even liked you. Yeh I said that. I was a high performer doing many duties and was a strong team player.

I survived 6 prior layoffs. In the end of 2018, I said 2019 was going to be a career change. I hoped I would get laid off. I somehow saw my future and on May 8, 2019, they laid off over 250, below the cap of reporting it to the state. This company I do not see around after 2022. They decision making makes it harder to take care of customers. Workconomy, Compucom and outsourcing all my work was the end of my career there. One major problem is, people have no clue how to communicate with each other in corp to even take care of a customer. Good bye OD, thanks for nothing..

I am very sad for the good people who lost their jobs. I’ve been through layoffs myself and this is so hard.

HOWEVER, there was a person who was laid off who I was hoping they would announce was actually fired because that person accumulated many fireable offenses over their career at Office Depot which includes bullying and s-xual harassment. We will never know if those reasons played into their lay-off because this person was laid off - they get to leave with a severance package and with an ok chance to be employed again. The remaining employees will never see justice for what they have gone through. The damage this person caused to so many individuals is exponential. Robbing someone of a safe working environment is abuse. How many good employees left the company because of this person? We just have left here the people who would take it quietly. Nice, right? I can imagine all the people whose stomachs would churn at the thought of having to work with this person and for how long they had to suffer this anxiety during this person’s long reign as a leadership figure. I imagine that, even though that person was a high performer, they probably were exposing the company to a lot of risk. It’s too bad some people with similar bullying behavior still remain here.

Hopefully, that person isn’t going around with a “woe is me” attitude and that they accept their fate as a just one.

Sorry for my lack of sympathy, but...bye Felicia to that person.

The cold hard fact is the CEO and execs pay lipservice to caring about employees and customers. These are a means to an end, which is "increasing shareholder value". Jerry is an egomaniac, as are most CEOs, and he has too much ego wrapped up in his decision to purchase Compucom, and the shareholders have too much exposure to just walk away. Also, there's Jerry's vision of "Workconomy" So when one division is underperforming, cuts must be made in all divisions, in order to lift shareholder value.

The only division that was really showing any growth was the contracts division, which was also heavily impacted by the cuts. Not sure what the impacts will be in the long-term, but in the short-term, performance will nosedive. Sure, smaller accounts being shuffled off to inside-sales or just left to wither and die is a strategic decision, but the impact of these customers leaving will be felt for some time to come.

The company is in "survival mode". Look at the overall economy. It's growing. Growth in the space occupied by Compucom is all most 10% yoy, and yet Compucom's business is declining. Retail is overall flat or up slightly, and yet Depots retail division is declining compared to 2018. This leaves contracts, which was slightly up, finally gaining traction after the last big reorg in 2017. This latest reorg will reignite customer churn.

It may be thin reassurance, but for we who were just let go, please consider that the overall economy is strong, and unemployment is low. Better for this to happen now, than in 6 months or a year when the economy retracts, and Depot is forced to lay off even more people...and they will be laying off more people. Depot will continue to lose business to Amazon, which will only accelerate in the coming months, and it will lose business to smaller regional players, as they abandon the lower end of their contract customers. Jerry will be gone in a year or less. The board will bring in a merger/acquisition executive to try to find a buyer. More layoffs, and then who knows? Maybe bankruptcy, maybe purchase by an equity firm. Maybe a merger with Staples (which is preparing for an IPO), maybe Amazon acquires.

By this time those who were recently laid off will be enjoying the next phase of their careers, and will be watching this unfold as spectators.

In Europe I have seen several cases in which: The employees organized a Huge group that started to buy stocks of their company...Then the group become a Big Shareholders and they...Bought back the company and changed the rules...and kicked off the super rich Ceo!!

From those let go I can see this layoff had nothing to do with performance. I think it was location, years with the company (let go of many legacy OD) and salaries. They had consultants...please don't let them rent space in your head by feeling it was personal. We lost some of our best performers. All of us who remain are very melancholy and my heart hurts. These people were not just co-workers....they were our friends... :'(