The time to have gotten out of Staples was when the AMs were laid off. For those of you who are still there, you are riding a sinking ship. Staples is a terrible company, run by terrible upper management, who make terrible decisions. Remember VIBE? They spent how much on that program, and yet upper management goes right back to the old ways of driving sales. I can’t remember how many times I was yelled at for not “selling” enough “free” tune ups. News flash! You can’t give your stuff away for free and expect to make money.
I saw all this coming when Staples announced changes to their General Manager’s stock compensation plan. Staples used to give a pretty good payout in stock options to the GMs. When they got rid of it they gave a raise to the base compensation, but split the raises over two years. We were told that the reason was, the company didn’t have enough money to pay out the entire payment, so it was split into two. That was a lie. Staples was banking on some GMs to be pissed at this change and leave the company, so they didn’t have to pay out the full amount. Sad to say I was one of those statistics. After they made this change there was no incentive to be a GM for Staples.
I remember seeing a top priorities list for Staples before I left. One of their top priorities was to retain top talent. I can say that all the top talent from my district has left, and do you think that the DM was reprimanded for it? No. My DM at one point had the audacity to call me and have a coaching with me about my stores turnover. Staples thinks that decorating a break room with cheap 99 cent crap and giving a “thanks” note card to employees is enough to keep morale high. I’m not tooting my own horn, but I ran a great store and had even better employees who gave me 120%. My employees were unhappy with Staples, not store management. I was completely honest with my employees about what was happening with the company. Also, how happy would you be if you were given a 10 cent raise for your year of hard work, the raise that the GM had absolutely no control over. I was embarrassed when I had to give reviews and compensation raises.
The layoffs that are happening and have happened, talks go on between upper management on who they want to keep. They let you know that it’s all based on tenure and review ratings, but it’s not. They decide who will keep drinking the kool aid, and who strokes the DM, RVP, SVP ego the most and those are the managers that they keep. When they went to GM only stores, they wanted to place more stress on the GMs because most of the GMs were high paid and had tenure with the company. What better way to save payroll than to force all the high paid managers out and replace them with much lower waged employees. Think about it. Who do you know that was laid off? I bet they had some tenure with the company. I know this happens because I received a call from my boss telling me to lower a review rating that I had given to one of my employees. The reason, the raise was too high.
Stores are forced to meet a .com budget. How nice is that, as a store, you have to help contribute to the demise of brick and mortar and ultimately your job.
For all the RISMs who were or are going to be laid off, I say good riddance! That position was an utter waste of payroll. There were far better AMs who lost their jobs than lazy good for nothing RISMs who contributed nothing to the stores. Terrible that the AMs lost their jobs before the RISMs.
Beware to all who are still with Staples. Staples doesn’t care anything about you, your family, your finances, or your well-being. They will use you then lay you off… this company is so shady I bet they even have plans in the works to lay people off and not pay out severances. If you are banking on a severance from this company when they lay you off, you’re going to be very disappointed.