Except to where and whom to follow?
The company that absolutely struggles with diversity, or even grasping a concept of what diversity means -- a white g-- male is the most diverse thing you can have, albeit perhaps a black g-- male – is now finding itself losing what it has desperately tried to hang on for years: the Caucasian “her”.
For years, since for the longest time now “her” only accounted for barely low 60%, never mind what origin she was. The buyers would go to trend shows trotting their PD&D partners with them looking at the next trends to rip off from C&B, PB and other “inspirational” brands, as these people had the guests that they wanted but somehow the idea was that if you made it on the cheap other “hers” would come along and in turn would do their own aspirational purchases.
The endless sea of now gone analysts would fill the great hall with their statuses, agendas and networking on CFT topics and special projects, all blindly following an ideal which at its core was an old, rotten apple. The culture where reinvention and agile simply means that a buyer can run any technical or any other organization within the company without even having any relevant experience. But they partner, they have critical thinking and they’ll learn the job on their job and will do it better than the teams they lead and will fix the team’s problems, because the team simply lacked the critical thinking and the new supporting facts are invested on the spot simply to support whatever agenda trickled down to them for this quarter.
No one really knows how much, in man hours, anything costs. Everything gets swept up to the vendor in terms of shipping cube volume, margin goals. These get dictated need to be met and everything else is secondary. Reinvent and refresh, as often as possible, because that’s the only way to make cheap product repurchseable. And if all of the above wasn’t enough, the TPP and other trade agreements are now effectively dead with talk about additional import fines and taxes on all items manufactured overseas what is there to do when 90% of your product comes from South East. Will you still be, blindly, forcing your margin requirements down the vendor’s throats?
This is where the rotten apple really becomes maggoted. The easy out of laying off the useless and overabundant workforce was already used up (although it could have easily been 30-40% of HQ), in fact a decent portion were rehired back making it even less effective as not only did you incur lay-off costs you’re now rehiring them at higher, more competitive wages. Canada and pharmacies got sold off for pennies on the dollar. The website – that thing still blows, yet the online sales grow simply because the store is dying and people are boggled how “buy online pick up in store” is a feature, as they still have to go to the store when competitors deliver their products to their house for free and now Amazon is building warehouses in HQ’s backyard and does free delivery of pretty much anything to your door within 2 hours. Oh yes, and don’t forget Apple, the company that single handedly caused poor electronics sales across the whole Target because they didn’t produce any new products. You’d think Target was an Apple Store Jr., with no other concept of "electronics" in existence besides what’s defined by Apple itself.
You now have to go back over 2 years to find a cheaper stock price, October 2014.
The musical chairs have started, even if you didn’t get the memo. Start playing.