Home Depot corporate employees are now required to experience some of the challenges that many store workers face everyday.
The company will require all corporate employees, even senior management and remote workers, to do an 8-hour shift in a store each quarter, Bloomberg reported.
Bwahahaha. Sounds like a nice gesture on paper, but having done a stint in retail many years ago, the corporate management and cubicle types will have things so screwed up that the regular store staff will beg for them to go back to the ivory tower and fuck right off.
ReplyDeleteI follow a website called NotAlwaysRight.com which features stories about the tribulations of retail workers and others in customer facing jobs. There are a great many customers who delight in acting like jerks towards people who aren't allowed to say anything back, particularly wait staff. Often people in the comments have suggested that maybe everyone should be made to do one of those jobs for a week or two so that they know what it's like. So, from that point of view, it doesn't seem like a bad policy.
ReplyDeleteStonyground.
"Customer always right" One of many reasons I'll never work retail
DeleteDamn fine idea!
ReplyDeleteOne of the best professional experiences I ever had was working a week up and downstream of my position. You learn a lot by walking a mile.
Buy HD stock.
This is an old method called "management by walking around" which went to Japan with the American Quality gurus Deming and Juran, then came back the US with its Japanese name "gemba." Comes and goes like other management fads because, like most Quality efforts, once management sees things are getting better, they stop doing it.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was because after getting an MBA and suit-job your hands and brain get real soft and you hurt yourself doing anything anymore ezcept play with boats and fast cars and strippers.
DeleteHow do we supply help when store people take time off. I know. We have management sit in. And they wont be missed. And it is free.
ReplyDeleteIn the seventies and eighties, the company I worked for was notorious for now painful their computers were to set up. The CEO brought in the appropriate managers with a big box in the center of the room. He told the crowd none of.them were going home until the computer in the box was up and running. The management types made it much easier after that.
ReplyDeleteHome Depot was once a stellar company .. then Bob "Jack Welch disciple" Nardelli (once given the moniker of America's worst CEO) took over .. he gutted the company and turned the place to shit.
ReplyDeleteWhat will this do to stop the biggest problem HD has, shoplifting.
ReplyDeleteHD strategy of building their stores near the highway has backfired ... big time... all the HD stores near me have put their products behind steel grates. It's a real pain in the ass and I usually just go to the local ACE.
I go to ACE for little things, never substantial purchases, they are simply too expensive at ACE.
DeleteEngineers who design cars should be forced to work in the Service department one day a week.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a line mechanic at a Ford dealership in the 80s an engineer was sent from Detroit to teach me the then new EECIV system. He was there a week so we had a lot of time to talk about different things. I asked him why they didn't simplify things to make them easier and cheaper to repair. He told me they complicate things on purpose to make it harder for independent and shadetree mechanics to work on them and force owners to take their cars to dealers for repairs. At that time Ford was lobbying Congress to let them seal the hoods and install hood locks that only dealers could open.
DeleteIn the eighties we instituted a program called “Day in the life”. Seeing the CFO and the VP of sales and marketing on the production line packaging cookies was worth it. According to them they had a great time.
ReplyDeleteHasn't McDonalds had this same policy since forever?
ReplyDeleteJohn G.
They do. They even had Donaldus Magnus working the fry cooker.
DeleteMcDonald's takes their policies very seriously.
Hell, they put DJT on the fryer just last week.
DeleteI have to say that from my experience working at Amazon for 5 years, this is a very good thing. All management at all levels within Amazon were required to work a shift occasionally doing the work even the lowest rung on the ladder did. It engendered respect for the managers because there was no way to say they had no clue what it was like to do what the worker bees did. And the respect also reflected back because they now understood some of what we were always bitching about. I even witnessed Bezos himself doing my job one day back in 2012, when he was already a billionaire and didn't need to get his hands dirty.
ReplyDeleteHow cute. Everyone is going to learn why the princess was locked away in the tower. We should give extra those working hard to unscrew reality after the princess is returned to her rightful postiton....
ReplyDeleteThis has been their policy for as long as I can remember - certainly 10+ years. The regular store employees hate it when the home office pukes come in because they're pretty clueless.
ReplyDeleteLastly, the worst run H-D store I've ever seen is the one near Cobb Galleria in Atlanta (the one closest to the HQ). I don't know why but it doesn't look like regional managers ever walk the store. Maybe they think that the HQ execs walk it on the regular, which sure doesn't seem to happen.
In the book "Built From Scratch" the founders of Home Depot said it was standard practice for all headquarters employees -- executives, lawyers, everyone -- to work at an actual Home Depot store for part of their orientation. If this is being presented as something new then it means they deviated from their founding practices and are trying to go back to first principles to fight off the rot that has taken hold in the senior management team.
ReplyDelete