They are doing bad. Laying off all of Territory Sales/Branch Managers, making customers pay there way to Orlando Convention and lastly selling Zoro products which Grainger owns at a 60% lower cost than Grainger....same indentical sku and item. Heard they are trying to sell to a large Chinesse investors hence leaning out th org.
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Grainger will try to keep up with Amazon and will fail miserably...why...because Jim Ryan is clueless.
Intergrates are hiring
Hey ZORO cartoons are cool
Who needs the GRAINGER brand
Here are my fragmented thoughts\input\observations\facts:
Just announced, internally only, that all TSR roles are being eliminated at the end of April. I know this is true because I was on the conference call when it was announced. They are also cutting the pay for many of the OSSCs who work in the field.
The CIO and VP of ecom just quit too.
Everyone I know is getting their resumes together. Moral is at an all time low.
Zoro is the future for Grainger.
The branch based business is a thing of the past. Based on their actions I believe they want to have field sellers and direct ship most orders with only a handful of branches in major metro areas and maybe some will call stations (like Amazon lockers) throughout the country.
TSR's just found out they are losing their jobs....The layoffs keep coming.
I like how the C-level leadership keeps saying everything is find, nothing to worry about. However, their actions look like those of a desperate company who can't cut costs fast enough.
Well guess what...Territory Sales is gone!
I used to work for Grainger in Territory sales. The biggest issue was that they were hiring sales managers with little to no experience.
They are not closing all branches. They are closing branches that have low traffic, which makes sense. There are so many ways to order Grainger product now: phone, email, Keepstock, website, fax or sales representative.
As for the TSR model, I agree. The model males no sense as the ate no different than mini account managers. They should have been new business hunters but they were not and it was never a focus. Definitely time to change the model.
The Grainger Show: customers did not have to pay their way. They had to pay their transportation own (airfare). Again, this was great because you get the customers who are serious about going and not partying or taking vacation.
Don't be surprised to see 75% of TSR's gone by end of Aril.
Laying off TSR's and Branch Managers is a complete fabrication. It's obvious the person posting this doesn't work for the company. I would suspect it's a competitor or disgruntled (fired) employee trying to hurt current employees by starting bogus rumors.
Grainger has all these account managers making 65,000 and more a year, they are not worth their salaries. They letting go all of the branches and sending the work to india & panama.
Everything I have seen indicates that the TSR organization will be no more. Meetings at the director level were held about this in H2 of last year. If I was a betting man, I would say that they are eliminating both TSRs and MTSs in favor of 1/5th the staff as tele-sales only model (TSAs) up at corporate. Think they'll do it mass-layoff style at the Grainger Show this year? Only time will tell.
One thing is very clear though is that Amazon is completely undercutting the entire distribution model, and Zoro was their attempt to capture the "online shopper". The other half of this is removing the outside sales model which is no where near as profitable.
Do you know for sure TSR's are being let go or is this just a rumor you heard? When is it happening?
Grainger announced today they will be closing 55 branches, so many people out of jobs