Here’s a bit of reading for your Sunday. It’s a critical analysis of this month’s round of layoffs at Barnes & Noble, potentially just another twist in this corporate death spiral (“The entirely unnecessary demise of Barnes & Noble“).
On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location – that’s 781 stores – told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should), the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their receiving managers, but not many.
Just about everyone lost between 3 and 7 employees. The unofficial numbers put the total around 1,800 people.
People.
As the author sees it, the company has now severed most of its full-time employees, those who would be expected to have the most experience on the job and the most commitment to their employer. They are gone. Essential functions are now done by part-time employees, if they are done at all.
It’s a bean counter’s way of cutting, without regard to how the organization really works or what this will mean to their all-important asset, their customers.
It’s a depressing read, for sure. It echoes the kind of cuts that have gone on throughout the news industry over the past two decades.
Surely there’s a better way….
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Ian, the moment I saw your headline, I had to read your blog. Based on the linked post, this was an executive decision. I think many people in the “bean counting” profession would agree that if you want a company to be successful, you make sure they are staffed adequately for Christmas and don’t plan to hire an expensive executive after you fire all of your core workers.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
–Oliver Goldsmith (1770)
The irony–happy I think–is that while B&N wreaked havoc on independent booksellers, they are again thriving with highly personalized service. B&N is squashed between them and the Amazon Godzilla.
The RARE independent bookseller……. Book Ends in Kailua is one. I would appreciate hearing about others anyone can recommend.
It’s the future, Ian. Safeway is moving to self check-out. Kahala Theatres has automatic ticket machines. Bank branches have few tellers as more transactions are handled through ATMs and online banking. Unions and would-be service workers need to recognize what’s happening and plan for new jobs that fit future needs. It’s evolution. Life does not stand still.
B & N could have reduced a significant chunk of that staff cutback by not wasting money on multimillion dollar CEO and others in the executive suite.
I find it surprising that a business thinks it can operate with part-time minimum wage people dealing with its clients and manning its stores but needs fulltime executives in its head office.
If B & N is the Titanic – and it is certainly already slipping beneath the waves – its executives will not only get the only lifeboats but will make sure they are well stocked with champagne & caviar!
It’s the way of the future and as predicted machines are going to run the show not humans. The machines will be well oiled w/ long lives and the displaced humans will be in tent cities. All the sci-fi stories I read in high school are coming true. Eek. Somebody respond with something positive, every notice of job losses like this freaks me out.
With rising insurance premiums. Getting rid of full time employees saves millions. unintended consequence of affordable care act.