It's a unique experience to watch a company crumble from the inside, to watch it fall from the ground floor. I work at a retail outlet, one that seems to be on it's last days. Pretty much everyone can see it, economists, stock holders, customers, and even the Managers are now admitting the possibility of the inevitable. There only seems to be one group of people that don't see the company's end, the people running corprate.
From the inside I can see the death pangs all around me, the scrambling of executives to try and keep the business going. First came the changes to stock, the expense easiest to cut down on without any bad PR. Our shipments, once a regular occurrence at the beginning of the week, now come in several deliveries, most coming at the end of the week. Our supplies became limited, orders were not being filled, a long stretch of time passed where my store had no plastic bags for customers, my boss had to purchase generic bags from an office supply store out of his own pocket. When new bags did come, they were of the same make as the ones my Manager had purchased, and had no company logo.
The next on the chopping block was customer policy. Months we heard about this, a change to the store policy, but it never really came. With the coming of the zero hour, it happened, we were given only a weeks notice of it. The policy changed to one with the obvious intent to grab more revenue, worded in a way that made it sound beneficial to the customer. The simple problem with this whole change is that altering a policy when your customer base is steadily declining does not work, chasing away customers who do not like the new policy, while those who stay with the company not being enough to maintain the slight increase to revenue per customer.
Still bleeding money, there was one more place to turn, payroll. Stores began to shut down, and those who remained open began to see a cut in available hours. Employees went from an average of four shifts per week at twenty to thirty hours to two shifts a week at ten to fifteen hours. The company, attempting to entice their employees to stay with these massive cuts to hours and news of the company's impending collapse, gave out incentives. These incentives though, were lacking, no real benefit to an employee losing nearly half of their average paycheck now.
I sit back and I watch these steps play out, I watch as a company desperately tries to cut corners instead of improve business. I think about the people soon to be out of a job, I think of myself being out of a job. Mostly, though, I think about the men and women who run the business from up high, people who refused to evolve with time. These people who clung ignorantly to the old ways while technology made them obsolete. These people who saw their business floundering years ago and refused to update, who chose to try and cut costs instead of trying to draw in business. I get angry at these men and women, who are responsible for the welfare of thousands of employees who will soon be jobless. I get angry at these people who had the opportunity to pioneer the new wave of their business, but instead refused and allowed others to do it instead. Those others who soon became competition, and killed this company... But we handed them the gun through inaction.
When I first took this job I knew it was a dying industry, I gave the company five years before it would fall. After working a while I changed my prediction to three years, I've now been working there for two years, and it doesn't look like this business will last more than another year. I face once again the possibility for unemployment, right now it seems like a certainty, though I may be wrong. Who am I to assume the cost cutting won't work, that we'll retain the gross to pull ourselves out of debt, that this company will be able to stay on it's feet for a while longer?
If it does, I just hope someone in charge understands it's time to evolve.
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