2009 Skeleton Crew.

Right? I’d be less surprised if they suddenly cut wage hours to the store to try to spike the profit more….

This. This is how they actually work.

I know my workplace is not retail, but as far as L2’s (upper management) goes, it doesn’t matter. Nowadays, they can hire Directors without experience to run places. Technically, middle management is considered interchangeable regardless of their expertise. So what happens is that they assume a call center, a book store and an IT help desk all work the same way. The current trend is “eliminate one position, monitor the metrics for performance, and if they do well, eliminate another one. Repeat until the metrics start to go down, and then stop.” So they do it EVERYWHERE in EVERY CORPORATION.

And then when they start to lose headcount from people leaving and complaining, they throw the workers a small bone in terms of a raise or something. They don’t want to add any extra positions until they absolutely have to – they’ll stick to the number of employees in a revolving door scenario until it is unsustainable.

However, by the time the business realizes it is unsustainable, the Director or whoever is in charge is already on to the next job. Directors usually move around every two years or so, disrupting workplaces to make a buck and then moving on for more money elsewhere. Then it’s hell to hire anyone, because their reputation for retention is terrible.

I’m a Director myself (although I am not one of those I mentioned) and I see memos and such going around from other Directors and L2s talking about how we need to look for ways to keep employee count low while keeping profits rolling in. They quote this new fangled business style emphasized in new books written by the new school of business that I have tried reading and they are full of BS. None of the new business styles understand how business and customer service and retaining people work. Google advises you to 1. make the workplace more fun to work at but 2. only hire the minimum amount of people to generate the necessary work required. A Google VP has an article at a website I pay to read called “Skimming the PTO Pool” talking about how you give nice paid time-off benefits but you then fill their schedules up to the point that you talk them out of taking any, often pretending to “forget” they made any requests (or just “forget” about time lost at the end of the year so the employees never question how much time doesn’t get carried over).

So while I am on the bandwagon that Boomers made life difficult for the newest generation of people, I am noticing that the newest generation of business people (starting early 2000s) are blood-sucking parasitic corporate managers who like to scam their own generation out of their paid time off and medical benefits to jump from to job for millions of dollars in bonuses.