I was a sales manager for 5+ years at this dump of a company Staples. I pushed out their shady extended service plan numbers that they shove down their customers throats. I hit the high tech repair dollar amounts that they wanted. I dealt with their immature man children that they call general managers... 99% of them harass you on your day off or do really dumb things like send employees to cover other stores when you have hardly any to cover your own. After 5 yrs of putting up with it and having teams of employees that were very good employees and generally enjoyed working there... they told me they were doing this "2013 Reinvention plan" aka their first wave of mass manager lay offs and store closures. They completely fudged my scoring to stay in the company and gave me a number that was .1 under their 2.0 rating at 1.9 score so that they could lay me off. Why? Well it wasn't because of my sales numbers I held some of the best in my region. It was because I was making a decent amount of money as a sales manager... it was blatantly obvious what they were doing. Clearing out all of the managers that were making good buck and replacing them with low paid key holders. I found another job before they could lay me off. I didn't even want their pity measly unemployment pay. I was doing everything in their stores, scheduling,selling,tech repair, cashier, manager, absolutely everything and the customers noticed and always gave us good customer service surveys. It was absolutely criminal what they did to me and a complete waste of 5 yrs of my life. I will never forget what a let down it was to give a company my all for 5 yrs and work my way up in management and then to be tossed into the trash in an instant. This was my final lesson to run far far away from retail work and to never look back.
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Just another example of Staples practicing discrimination and ageism
Same thing here. I was a Keyholder/Customer Service Lead, but had been there for 7 years and making too much money. Since i was over 50, they gave me a list of ages to show it was not age discrimination. In my region, they kept
8 people (1 in each district) and laid off 240. So it was definitely NOT about performance. I am still looking for work and moving in with family since I cannot afford my rent.
I could not agree more. I spent 6 years and was let go because I made more money than most new gm's. I am also 62 years old. Did they want to keep me, I doubt it. Thanks Ron. Maybe you should go on undercover boss to find out what your employees really think. You WILL be surprised. Customers do not want service plans shoved down their throats. As far as computers are concerned if you are going to have kids fix computers, make sure they know what they are doing.
good post, have seen this scenario many times. what industry did you transition to?