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axeil posted:TB, I feel like the place you worked at is the place from that famous SA (at least I think it was here) story where a guy got re-assigned to a division that didn't really exist and no one noticed so he continued to get a paycheck despite not doing anything. This is amazing.
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May 26, 2017 18:53
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:This is amazing. It is. But it is also fake. Still very funny.
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May 26, 2017 18:54
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I think in regards to Best Buy, with their contraction I think they cut down on operating costs, and with a reduced number of stores they were able to put the ~better~ employees in the remaining stores, which helped especially since outside of some smaller or even more specialized chains like Video Only, they pretty much are the last dedicated electronics retailer left with physical store space.
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May 26, 2017 18:54
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Jack2142 posted:I think in regards to Best Buy, with their contraction I think they cut down on operating costs, and with a reduced number of stores they were able to put the ~better~ employees in the remaining stores, which helped especially since outside of some smaller or even more specialized chains like Video Only, they pretty much are the last dedicated electronics retailer left with physical store space. Is competition for electronics just really poor in the US or something? Basically every physical retailers is either switching to online or getting pushed out of market by online competitors over here.
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May 26, 2017 18:58
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:It is. Oh yes, all the old school SA stories are fake, but we had some really good fiction writers around here back in the day. poo poo, it's why I think people still do weird stuff in D&D like the Romney Death Rally posts of the infamous Last Days of Capitalism series in 2008.
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May 26, 2017 19:00
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MiddleOne posted:Is competition for electronics just really poor in the US or something? Basically every physical retailers is either switching to online or getting pushed out of market by online competitors over here. Circuit City, CompUSA, all the other big electronics-focused national retailers went of business years ago. Now it's just Best Buy for national, and a few random regional chains that are still doing well like Fry's mostly in the southwest, P.C. Richard mostly in the northeast, etc. There are of course minor amounts of electronics selection in department stores like Wal-Mart and Target, but that's not really the same thing.
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May 26, 2017 19:09
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MiddleOne posted:Is competition for electronics just really poor in the US or something? Basically every physical retailers is either switching to online or getting pushed out of market by online competitors over here. I think to a certain extent yes, TV's or Soundsystems I think for instance benefit somewhat from being viewed in person and same goes for other electronics. I would say many Americans even millenials are fairly tech illeterate and don't know what entails a good computer and thus when looking on Newegg or Amazon or heaven forbid parts all the numbers can look like gibberish. Having someone on hand to explain is helpful even if they are trying to push extended warranty crap. Also they do price matching and have a decent online store that usually will offer same day pickup. Plus I would never use it, but Geeksquad as mentioned I think has some brand recognition as people who can fix your crappy computer and have a uniform and look professional. More so than the random computer store run by a grizzled neckbeard.
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May 26, 2017 19:19
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axeil posted:Oh yes, all the old school SA stories are fake, but we had some really good fiction writers around here back in the day.
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May 26, 2017 19:56
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I joined a company that had been recently acquired by another nearby and still hadn't really melded systems yet. We had 3 or 4 different competing document retention systems and a hopelessly cobbled together SAP set up. To top it off I was working in the newly formed Life Sciences group and per regs, all of our systems had to be "validated" so we needed to run everything parallel in SAP so we could build/bill it and another to be validated in case we were audited. Also all divisions compete with each other for budget, almost sears style, which results in the expected tension and animosity.
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May 26, 2017 20:02
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Cicero posted:P-p-powerbook wasn't fake was it?? What are you talking about, of course it was a genuine P-p-powerbook!
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May 26, 2017 20:13
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fishmech posted:Circuit City, CompUSA, all the other big electronics-focused national retailers went of business years ago. Now it's just Best Buy for national, and a few random regional chains that are still doing well like Fry's mostly in the southwest, P.C. Richard mostly in the northeast, etc. CompUSA is still around but they suck. They were bought by Tiger Direct and run as brick and mortar locations for the online business and in store repairs/tech support.
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May 26, 2017 20:52
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anonumos posted:CompUSA is still around but they suck. They were bought by Tiger Direct and run as brick and mortar locations for the online business and in store repairs/tech support. I thought the Tiger Direct retail storefronts with CompUSA branding got dropped a few years back? If you go on the CompUSA site now they don't even list any of their own products, it's just some sort of search engine for Amazon etc.
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May 26, 2017 20:57
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I wonder if all this just terrible management that seems widespread is what is knee capping productivity growth across the country.
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May 26, 2017 21:11
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fishmech posted:I thought the Tiger Direct retail storefronts with CompUSA branding got dropped a few years back? If you go on the CompUSA site now they don't even list any of their own products, it's just some sort of search engine for Amazon etc. Maybe they have. The store I used to work at is listed as closed on Google Maps and their website has this neat little page: http://compusa.com/static/about quote:We should probably point out the obvious — things are much different now in 2016 than they were back in 2007. It would be silly to compete directly with Best Buy and Amazon, and a waste of time to take a half-measure like opening up a vending machine in the airport or a pop-up store in the mall. So, instead of any of that, we are going to help you find the absolute best offers every day. Think of us as your personal tour guide for this new e-universe. Very different. When I worked there they began focusing on the big box appliances like TVs, printers, entertainment systems, and car audio. They moved away from the computer components and stuff that made them bank and pretty much lost everything. Went out of business, bought by TigerDirect.com, and I guess they are now gone from the retail sector altogether. Now they're just another aggregator like newegg.com or pricewatch.com. Weird.
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May 26, 2017 21:11
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BrandorKP posted:I wonder if all this just terrible management that seems widespread is what is knee capping productivity growth across the country. Yes. How many times I could have sold a $3000 gaming laptop but aww shucks we didn't have the right RAM to upgrade it or the other addons that made rich kids drool. "I can order the RAM and call you to set up a time to install i...oh, you want it now...welp, thanks for coming." Every day people were coming in for video cards or new power supplies, but drat our selection just sucked. "No, we don't have that new invidiuh card, but we have this one that totally isn't crippled but we sell for the same amount of money as the latest one they just unveiled at E3. Sorry dude." "Nope, I don't have any 8GB sticks of RAM. We have 4GB sticks, surely you can just install twice as many!" "Would you like to sign up for our protection plan? (Dude, you need it, this hardware sucks!)" anonumos fucked around with this message at 21:17 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 26, 2017 21:14
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BrandorKP posted:I wonder if all this just terrible management that seems widespread is what is knee capping productivity growth across the country. Productivity's great, it's wages that are kneecapped.
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May 26, 2017 22:13
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anonumos posted:Yes. How many times I could have sold a $3000 gaming laptop but aww shucks we didn't have the right RAM to upgrade it or the other addons that made rich kids drool. "I can order the RAM and call you to set up a time to install i...oh, you want it now...welp, thanks for coming." One of the most aggravating things is when I hear "oh, we don't have those in stock, they're really popular so they sell out!" If it's not a limited-production product, there's just no excuse for that -- it's a sign that you should order more of them and less of the poo poo that doesn't sell.
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May 26, 2017 22:38
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The people workng at the shop quite possibly do not have direct control of what comes in.
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May 26, 2017 22:43
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OwlFancier posted:The people workng at the shop quite possibly do not have direct control of what comes in. Yeah like, obviously the sales staff wouldn't but frequently the store manager doesn't either. It's all a shell game.
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May 26, 2017 22:46
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As an example if I want to increase stock of something in my store I have to use the electronic stock control to increase the target amount, this is in theory connected to how much I will receive but frequently the system will elect not to order stock, or order less stock, or order more stock, or I will be sent stock without using the electronic system, or the central office will change how much they think I should have, or the stock system will decide to reset itself back to the default, or a supplier will send in someone to try and steal one of the stock control guns and set my target to 3 times what I can fit on shelf so that the electronic system orders more stock from them. I feel like I would have more success if I just set fire to some old price labels in a pentagram made of stock return tape and chanted the threefold invocation of Making Good The Allocation. As tiresome as manually ordering stock is, at least I get what I ask for and I generally don't get what I don't ask for.
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May 26, 2017 23:03
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Productivity's great, it's wages that are kneecapped. The discussions in this thread, are making me think there is case to be made that the low wages (which are a big part of widespread poor firm manangement) and poor treatment of workers might be causal to slow productivity growth. I wonder if there is a way to test that?
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May 26, 2017 23:15
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U.S. workforce productivity is at an all-time high. Everyone likes to blame management (and there are lots of issues with management of retail stores) but a lot of the problems retailers are having are not "management" related. They are large macro trends in shopping habits/economics. If you could go back in time to the 1980's and warn Sears about the fate of the American mall, then you could maybe save them. But I don't think even the most brilliant businessperson/executive/manager/economist could have saved Sears, Rue21, or Payless in the last 5 years. Places like Target and K-Mart had chances to come out on top, but they really did suffer badly from poor decisions/management. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 23:19 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 26, 2017 23:17
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OwlFancier posted:The people workng at the shop quite possibly do not have direct control of what comes in. I have worked in corporate retail for years in Inventory Management / Allocation and can confirm no one on the store side (even up to regional VPs) can actually make anything happen. At best, store managers can try to bubble up a request through several more layers of hierarchy and hope it makes it to HQ. Inventory Management is super centralized. If a store doesn't have something it's quite frequently because Buyers/Merchants did not order enough to actually be able to stock stores adequately.
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May 26, 2017 23:33
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:
Haha no, unless what you want to tell Sears is "prevent that Eddie Lampert guy from merging K-Mart into you and then running you into the ground starting in the mid-2000s". All you have to do to keep Sears doing ok is to just have another boring CEO in charge, instead of that crazy libertarian true believer.
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May 26, 2017 23:36
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aqu posted:I have worked in corporate retail for years in Inventory Management / Allocation and can confirm no one on the store side (even up to regional VPs) can actually make anything happen. At best, store managers can try to bubble up a request through several more layers of hierarchy and hope it makes it to HQ. Inventory Management is super centralized. If a store doesn't have something it's quite frequently because Buyers/Merchants did not order enough to actually be able to stock stores adequately. And Laffo at getting a merchant to admit they hosed up and under purchased.
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May 26, 2017 23:40
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BrandorKP posted:The discussions in this thread, are making me think there is case to be made that the low wages (which are a big part of widespread poor firm manangement) and poor treatment of workers might be causal to slow productivity growth. I wonder if there is a way to test that? I'm wondering if you mean something different by "productivity"? Because the thing economists define as productivity, which I will not begin to pretend I understand, has been going steadily up for decades: 
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May 26, 2017 23:43
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:I'm wondering if you mean something different by "productivity"? Because the thing economists define as productivity, which I will not begin to pretend I understand, has been going steadily up for decades: The historical average rate of change per year for productivity has been about 3 percent. Since the financial crises it has been stuck at around 1.5 percent. There doesn't seem to be a consensus as to why and it has a bunch of harmful repercussions. This is normally seen a a seperate problem from the decoupling of producivity growth from wage growth, which is also a big problem. What if the latter is contributing to the former?
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May 27, 2017 00:39
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Xae posted:And Laffo at getting a merchant to admit they hosed up and under purchased. I don't entirely understand the concept of buyers but, well, being on the receiving end of one, it appears as though large companies employ random people to go out and find items they think people will want to buy, then give them absurd amounts of money to buy absurd quantities of these items based entirely on their gut feeling that it will be the hot new thing, then they dole the supply of these items out to individual retail outlets whether they want them or not, in order to justify their presumably multimillion dollar impulse purchase. Is that at all accurate?
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May 27, 2017 00:49
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:I'm wondering if you mean something different by "productivity"? Because the thing economists define as productivity, which I will not begin to pretend I understand, has been going steadily up for decades In economics, you have labor productivity, which is just GDP/(total working hours*), and capital productivity, which is GDP/capital**. Finally, there's total-factor productivity AKA multi-factor productivity, which is just a weighted combination of labor productivity and capital productivity. *Sometimes adjusted for education and experiance. **Economic capital: things used for business like machinery, production equipment, and office computers.
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May 27, 2017 00:51
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OwlFancier posted:I don't entirely understand the concept of buyers but, well, being on the receiving end of one, it appears as though large companies employ random people to go out and find items they think people will want to buy, then give them absurd amounts of money to buy absurd quantities of these items based entirely on their gut feeling that it will be the hot new thing, then they dole the supply of these items out to individual retail outlets whether they want them or not, in order to justify their presumably multimillion dollar impulse purchase. At a high level, yes. When I was at BBY the God-Tier merchant was the big screen TV Guy. Because, he was just so good at increasing sales of Big Screen TVs. It had nothing to do with HDTV becoming a "thing". Nope. PURE SKILL.
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May 27, 2017 00:52
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That's depressing. Like when I buy all the DLC for a game because I was bored and it looked sort of cool, I feel shame afterwards, people shouldn't be paid to do that.
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May 27, 2017 00:57
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OwlFancier posted:That's depressing. It is really cut throat though. If you gently caress up your margins even a bit they'll can you. This is why areas of a chain that suck tend to keep sucking. No one wants to be running the CD section when it is obvious that iTunes is going to eat your lunch. So any merchant they do get in the area is both dumb as gently caress and guaranteed to be replaced in a year or two. There is more to it than binge buying. It is a ton of negotiation. Price, delivery time and logistics, cross promotion, etc. What kind of discount do you give if they're willing to ship directly to the store? How much more will you charge if you have to pick it up from the port? What quantities will be delivered at what intervals to what distribution centers? What is the expected amount of time from Order -> Delivery? Is there restrictions and Options placed on reordering?
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May 27, 2017 01:20
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BrandorKP posted:The historical average rate of change per year for productivity has been about 3 percent. Since the financial crises it has been stuck at around 1.5 percent. There doesn't seem to be a consensus as to why and it has a bunch of harmful repercussions. This is normally seen a a seperate problem from the decoupling of producivity growth from wage growth, which is also a big problem. What if the latter is contributing to the former? It is a contributing factor, actually. One of the major issues is that companies don't want to expand productivity as much because the demand just isn't there to justify it. This is why you see so many companies desperately scrambling to figure out how to sell things to millenials but millenials are just going  "I'd love to buy your stuff but I'm loving broke. Sorry."
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May 27, 2017 01:37
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It is a contributing factor, actually. One of the major issues is that companies don't want to expand productivity as much because the demand just isn't there to justify it. This is why you see so many companies desperately scrambling to figure out how to sell things to millenials but millenials are just going It is funny how many "industry insider" stories I'll see crawl along my facebook feed that are basically "Millenials are too dumb to buy our product!" Then you get newscasters on local morning shows ranting about fabric softener dying off, literal "old man yells at cloud" stuff.
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May 27, 2017 02:05
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YF19pilot posted:It is funny how many "industry insider" stories I'll see crawl along my facebook feed that are basically "Millenials are too dumb to buy our product!" Then you get newscasters on local morning shows ranting about fabric softener dying off, literal "old man yells at cloud" stuff.  drat millenials won't even touch a dead body!
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May 27, 2017 02:26
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fishmech posted:
That's because people don't tend to die young anymore, so death isn't something you need to deal with personally until middle age. But the Republicans are working on it. So more people might have this valuable experience soon.
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May 27, 2017 03:01
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FistEnergy posted:Best Buy keeps posting solid profits and their stock has jumped up again. Boywhiz88 was right all along.
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May 27, 2017 06:31
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Unrelated story did you know that in a dysfunctional company you can completely not do your job, like literally not do it at all, for roughly four months before anybody notices? every time someone complains about increasing the minimum wage for fast food employees I think of things like this and inform them that what we need to do is start paying people who work in offices like this minimum wage because compared to working, say, a McDonalds, your average office job is a cakewalk. people who work in offices are, by and large, scum of the earth I bet the minimum wage would jump up right quick if Average White rear end in a top hat In Sales/Finance got paid $8 an hour.
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May 27, 2017 07:15
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DC Murderverse posted:every time someone complains about increasing the minimum wage for fast food employees I think of things like this and inform them that what we need to do is start paying people who work in offices like this minimum wage because compared to working, say, a McDonalds, your average office job is a cakewalk. people who work in offices are, by and large, scum of the earth Most minimum wage jobs are basically slavery.
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May 27, 2017 19:21
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fishmech posted:
Done both. Am a millennial. Dead bodies are heavy as hell. Doubly so when it's a former friend. 
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