Relatively new employee here that has learned more about the company in the last two weeks than the entire first year.
Working at HyVee is basically like being a member of a dysfunctional family where dad drinks a lot and gets his way through force of will and threats of violence, mom makes excuses for him and tries to make it up to you but she's also suffering and dying inside. Dads house and dads rules, don't like it get out
The last Randy video was insightful but not what I was hoping for, I do appreciate him honestly putting out there that basically he is who is is, and he's too old to change at this point. I do think it's unfortunate but it does help answer some questions.
The facts haven't changed that it was handled badly, there was gas lighting and lying and no one took ownership, we've instead projected all of that on channel 8 for reasons only God knows.
The type of leadership that can run a store by being an aggressive force of presence absolutely fails when it intersects with digital business and the type of people that are needed to run it.
There is a culture clash happening where you have leaders that came up through hard physical work and dedication to make a great living vs a smaller privileged elite that came out of school as full stack developers at 25 yrs old making 2-3 times as much as the old guy with crippling arthritis and chronic back pain from unloading trucks and stacking shelves for 20yrs.
The recipe for the last dust up at HyVee follows.
Mix in some personality disorders like narcissism, maybe a little alcohol abuse, bake in team of psychophants over a quarter of falling profits. Season in a little Q-anon level conspiracy theories.
Once firm remove from oven and beat 121 employees out the door with it.
Final thoughts, it basically is what it is, love it or leave it, it's a retail grocery that is trying to cope that it needs a lot of intelligent highly paid people to be a player in digital retail forced at warp speed due to the pandemic and our leaders are using 1990s management styles that only work on employee that can be intimidated.
I do think under all of this there is a lot that can be said about the nature of work and taking pride in working no matter what your skill and compensation, I suspect Randy has very strong feelings that are actually inspiring and beautiful and if he could find the right words it actually might be moving unfortunately when given the opportunity to elucidate them he just sounded like a jerk and a bully.
I still would like to see him do a year working at every position at HyVee and have it filmed for a pilot, I'm confident that it would be a success, he's now the CEO that made a stand on how important the retail positions are and if he's a man of character that I think he is, he'll turn over his position and do it, it will fix Hy-Vee's image, his own personal image and grow the business, at the end of the year of if Randy wanted to make a run for Congress or governor he would be in an excellent position to do that.
I'm calling it the CEO challenge and it needs to happen, hyvee needs this, the state needs this the studio equipment and production team can be brought back easily there is no better way to fix all of this. Randy if you are seeing this please consider this challenge, if you are serious about your feelings about sticking up for the stores this terrible week could have opened up a lot of opportunities for you personally and to leave hyvee better than you found it.
The nation is having a crisis of work, you personally were dragged on one of the largest social media platform on Reddit /r/antiwork community, with over 2 million subscribers, it was embarrassing for Hyvee and the entire state of Iowa.
Taking this step would go far in fixing the issues you had a hand in and actually healing the country. Do it.