So I don’t know about the rest of home office, but when I left the buyers ( and buyer adjacent) were badly overworked. They laid off all the support groups who helped the buyers and who helped with mods and pricing. Each time they cut a group, technology was supposed to replace those people.
Well, guess what? The technology doesn’t work. But you can’t say that out loud because then they try to get rid of you.
They got rid of most of planning and replaced them with BA and FSS. FSS doesn’t work so the associate buyers are keying feature amounts with no idea about inventory flow. Gee, wonder why the back rooms are full? Oh and they cut replenishment back, too, because the system will manage freight flow. How’s that working out in the stores?
When they cut planning, who verifies the buyer financials when they buy stuff? Most buyers are just out of college, responsible for a half billion to a billion dollars, and they couldn’t explain to you the difference in run rate and penny profit to save their souls. But who needs financial planners right? Cut them. Let the buyers guess at how much they need to buy.
Get rid of pricing. A program will do all that and we will have the buyers enter all the pricing. Because the buyers had nothing to do as it was…. Oh wait! Why do we have all these pricing errors? Oh you mean the pricing system doesn’t work half the time…? Imagine that.
Let’s run off 60% of our buyer talent leading up to Covid. We can rehire college kids at amounts your previous associates didn’t make until they were TEN YEARS with the company. And let’s give the kids a billion dollars to manage just for kicks.
Then for extra funzies, fire so MANY of your mod team, you don’t have enough people to enter mods into the system accurately. And get rid of all your assortment discipline associates at a time when your buyers are all new and don’t know anything about their products or their mods. What could possibly go wrong?
In addition, let’s keep the buyers in pointless meetings all day. Let’s dump ALL the dotcom responsibilities on them. Hold them accountable for dotcom but have site manager teams in New Jersey and other places that don’t do what the buyers ask and have no repercussions for a cr-ppy site experience. Let’s make all the item setup tools not work so that buyer’s constantly have to submit Jira tickets that only sometimes get resolved. Let’s make all the systems needed to research dotcom problems not talk to each other and only be useful once in a blue moon.
Oh. And PS. Let’s have the people that answer the Jira tickets only resolve them about a third of the time and have ZERO sense of urgency.
Let’s hire in leaders who have never been buyers so they have no idea how long it takes in the broken technology to get the answers to their emails. Let’s hire clout chasing, butt kissing leaders whose focus changes every officer meeting and who are afraid to tell senior leaders when their ideas are bad.
Oh and let’s keep the buyers giving sales pitches at long drawn out dog and pony show meetings where the bologna that is just made up never gets called out. The goal of these meetings is to tell the best story so you can get noticed. The best story tellers/fibbers (versus the most skilled buyers) will be the ones that get promoted.
In the meantime, you have buyers just a buying things! They aren’t negotiating because they don’t have time for that. And they don’t work together because they aren’t incentivized to do so.
Because negotiating isn’t being taught, the only way to address margin is raising prices…. Wonder what the price gap trend is since Greg Foran left? But that’s ok. Because Walmart bought Jet and how many other failed internet retailers? How much did that cost? $3-$4 billion. Wait? I know. Flipkart in India is gonna save the day! How much did that cost? $16 billion initially? Plus maybe another couple of billion spent on it since then? But the merchants (and store ops) have to make up for this.
Then let’s make the buyers sell Walmart connect and Luminate….even though everyone believes suppliers are building the cost of those services into the cost of the items where it will get passed along to the customer.
Gee. I wonder why all the merchants are leaving? India is the future growth market. We can afford to gut US merchandising and store ops. What’s the worst that could happen?
It’s a revolving door up there because the culture has been thrown to the wolves. It all started when the current EVP of sourcing was in HR and she introduced GE’s rank and yank to Walmart. 5 to 10 years ago Walmart had some really great merchant talent but leadership couldn’t badmouth the talent enough. What they wouldn’t give to have that group back again…..