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Radio Shack E-Fires 400 Workers
KingSkippus writes "You've got mail! ...and no job! The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that RadioShack has notified 400 workers by e-mail that they are being laid off. The e-mails state, 'The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.' Nothing says thank you for your years of service to our company quite like an e-boot out the door."
Reminds me of "Office Space".
Obliterate advertising!
Radio Shack has been in real trouble for years, since shortly before I left. The article mentions RSH stock price closing just over $18, down from around $80 before this all began. I can't say that I am surprised that they chose email as the way to go on the firings.
Make sure you don't have any beverage in your mouth when you read this: All members of Radio Shack management and all of their top sales people from the entire company, plus most of the corporate staff (thousands of people) just returned home from an all-expenses paid 3 to 6 day drip to Las Vegas, NV for a "Peak of Performance" rally. More like a valley of performance, but to hell with it.
FairTax baby!
Nothing says "e-mail what now? Must have gotten caught in my spam filter, heh..." like going into work anyway, and forcing the boss to say it to your damned face.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I came in late and everybody was standing around excited for me to check my mail.
Do you have a meeting? Do you have a meeting?
Um, yeah, in 30 minutes.
Oh man, that sucks. Only a few of us got it, and none of the boss' friends got the meeting invite. You're gone.
They were right.
Yeah, when I worked there when I was in college, they were thrilled to have me since I at least had a rudimentary understanding of electronics. Every time some nerdy looking guy came into the store, they'd always send him to me. If somebody was hanging out in the back by the small electronic parts, they'd send me back there. I was no engineer, but I at least knew what a resistor was, and could point them to the transistors and diodes. The customers were as shoked as the rest of the employees. I even read their "Getting Started in Electronics" book and helped one customer build his own car alarm dummy box. I was one of the 15%. Certainly, I was the ONLY salesman in the store that knew anything aobut the parts in the back.
The company has a hate/hate relationship with electronic parts. Radio Shack soooo desperately wants to be Best Buy or Circuit City, but with their lousy prices on high-end stuff, they just can't pull it off. The electronic parts section that the company despises is the only thing that keeps them afloat. If they could find a way to BE circuit city, the parts section in the back of the store would be eliminated overnight. I'm sure that the future of selling electronic parts keeps the Tandy executives from sleeping soundly at night, but with a 300% gross profit on that stuff, they just can't let go of their only really profitable business.
Thanks,
Mike
When my co-workers were sacked by email I breathed a sigh of relief when I didn't get one. The next morning my swipe key wouldn't get me in the door. The guy I asked to reactivate my swipe key at lunch time was the one that let me know that I had lost my job.
I've never seen a company fire someone who didn't have a security guard escort them to the desk for thier belongings and then to the the door. In a mass layoff, the company would contact a few employees who weren't getting laid off and ask them to com in early, then meet everyone else at the door and take them in a few at a time. Usualy this is preceeding a form letter issued the previous payday.
I do know of a guy who was fired at some company (not nameing names) and was left to finish his shift. He wasn't escorted out or monitored and decided to place clear scotch tape over a few dozen opticle sensors on the production line after his shift. This was on friday and it took three weeks to get the production line going again. Every section was registering an obstruction when there wasn't, the computer was replaced two times and you couldn't see the tape on the sensor heads. Eventualy someoen decided to replace everthing on the control and safety circuits and found the causes later. I don't know how much it ended up costing them.
Well, if that is now really legally acceptable I know what's going to happen next, expect a new type of spam, the 'sack' spam. That also has the effect ot training your spam filter so you'll never receive the real one. As a matter of fact, it probably pretty much nukes this for the next time it's attempted.
Insert
I was gently encouraged to voluntarily quit my job awhile back. They knew I wanted to quit and they had layoffs coming up, so I guess they thought they'd just asked me quietly if perhaps I wouldn't be happier being self-employed. (Which I am.) Was really quite entertaining. But I gotta say, I thought they were really careless. Facilities managment shut off my security card a week early, which was kinda cute, but everyone kept letting me into the building in the morning anyways, and eventually my manager had them turn it back on. They didn't shut off my various accounts until about a week after I'd left, so Adium kept signing me into Sametime. This confused the heck out of some of the people there who kept asking me various software support questions, and then following them up with, "Wait, didn't you leave the company last week?" And I had full access to pretty much everything I normally had access to for the week or so between tendering my resignation and my last day (which was a lot), and my VPN access didn't go away for almost two weeks after I'd actually left. Of course, I'm a good guy and wasn't even remotely tempted to do anything evil -- I rather enjoyed working there -- but it seems to me that with clients and such, this kind of issue could be a serious legal liability no matter how much you trust the employee.
Actually, what might work with the cubicle set would be to put an opposing two of their partition walls on motorised rails, linked to a database that moved them inward when their quotas went down, and outward when they went up. Give them inflatable chairs, too -- so when the walls move in too close, you can fire them directly through the roof.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
As a former long-time employee at RS, let me just say this news comes as absolutely no surprise.
Their entire management structure is irrepairably flawed. Most of their top guys were promoted from store-level positions with absolutely no formal training on how to run a fortune 500 corporation. These 'executives' know only how to lead through threats, intimidation, and constant turnover.
In the 1980s and early 90s, they went from being one of the largest and most respected computer manufacturers (Tandy) to almost zero computer sales. In 1990, there was a RadioShack store in every neighborhood, yet they completely missed the boat on the Internet boom. In about 2000 they happened to be in the right place at the right time and lucked into the cell phone boom, hence their good stock performance during this time. They soon (within months) screwed that up and their stock fell to a third of its former value almost overnight.
Now they've been doing nothing new, with the exception of several scandals involving their former CEO, Dave Edmonson. I'd imaging their long term strategory at this point is simply circling the drain long enough for some conglomerate to buy their name at a firesale price for use in some branding strategy
Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
it happens only in America
Nope.
One time, I was 1 week into a 3-month posting in Europe, and I got an e-mail from Australia telling me my 3-month notice period started immediately. I had to work through it of course. I was paid out the 4 weeks of vacation I'd accumulated, but lost the hundreds of hours of time-off-in-lieu. I'd been with the firm 8 years.
Trying to find a new job when you're 10,000 miles away from home isn't easy. And of course the customer, who had paid $$$ for my services, was not pleased, they wanted me to stay longer and work on other stuff.
Yes, I should have taken the time off in lieu, but that would have been cheating the customer. There's such a thing as professional ethics.
I took the firm to industrial arbitration, won, but the legal fees ate up nearly all of the 3 months pay I got.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
I think it has something to do with the general intelligence level of the population, or the general caring level of the population. All employees are required to have learned all the basics, but that doesn't mean that it stuck.
I know there are at least a dozen employees in the company that can handle just about anything you can throw at them, because I trained them to be able to do that.
Unfortunatly, I didn't even get an email that my job was gone, I picked up my company cell phone to make a call on my day off, and was told I was no longer employed.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I have read all the 5-rated comments and seems to me that the consensus is American job culture sucks, Radio Shack sucks.
Due to my trollish habits, I am always inclined to say something in contrary.
At the last company I worked for, there were 3 waves of firing people. In all of them a top level manager talked to them, thanked them and explained to them why they are fired. That it has nothing to do with them, that it is related to the products performance which is very little to do with them. Of course, people were not happy anyway, and they rightfully should not be: well, they were fired, but there was an effort from the company to alleviate the pain.
The company I am talking about is not the best, and it has a bad reputation in the IT industry for their cold and mindless approach to people, so I assume the situation with graceful firing is better in other IT companies.
I have to admit though that people who were fired were seasoned professional programmers, many with PhD in physical, chemical and biological sciences.
Another important comment is that the waves were about 50-100 people. When the amount of people to be laid off is larger it becomes a logistic problem to fire them at once, in one take to minimize the effect on job. It might explain the "e-mail" twist of it, but in no way it explains the "no-thanks" angle. So yes, Radio Shack sucks.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I didn't mind when I got fired from a dollar store, on the phone no less, and they didn't even have the balls to tell me I was fired, just that I didn't get any hours that week. I only didn't mind because I hated that job. . . and that I got a job a few months later that pays more than twice what my boss was making. I also got a good laugh when I learned 2 months later that ex-boss got fired for being a dipshit.
If it had been a decent job (even Radio Shed would have been a better job) I probably would have been a little more upset with that kind of firing. Had I been fired by a company form letter (which I normally filter to my delete folders anyway) it would have been much more embarassing when I showed up for my next shift not even having read the letter. . .
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
I once worked for a company that was as chickenshit as this. One of the partners was diagnosed with cancer so he sold his holdings and went to Ireland to live whatever he had left. An ex-wife of his son had a job in the company and they wanted to get rid of her quietly so they sent a process server to the bungelow she was staying in on Maui with her final check and severance. She hired a lawyer in hawaii and filed suit there after renting a house that her lawyer found her for residency reasons. She sought 3 million in damages and the company had to deal with the whole thing,including depositions by all of the parties involved in the buyout, in hawaii which damn near broke the bastards. She never figured to win, she just wanted to see them jump through hoops. They eventually settled out of court with the usual NDA but I know it had to be a good chunk because she sent all the people she knew in the company a 250 dollar gift certificate for Walmart that christmas saying she knew the company wouldn't be able to afford the usual christmas turkeys that year.
While it is certainly wrong to e-fire someone, a company I once worked for did one worse. The company got bought out and the new owners started downsizing. I worked in IT, specifically, I was in charge of the user accounts for the network, email, etc. I would get a list of accounts to disable every so often, sometimes with a note saying it was urgent and they needed to be deleted NOW. So I deleted them. Within 10 minutes, my phone was ringing off the hook with people complaining that they couldn't get to their email. They had not been told that they were fired, and I had to let them in on the secret.
When I then started complaining to the asshats in management about that, they informed me that they had sent the people emails about their impending loss of a job. I later found out that this email was sent about 5 minutes before they told me to delete it, thus none of them had actually received the email.
I was later fired as well, though I was pretty happy about the situation since I got a sweet severence.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
I don't feel at all good about the precedent of firing people using email, but I'm reluctant to make an assumption based on the tone of a slashdot story. The article states:
If this is true, it at least means that the company had given employees some warning that bad news was coming. In another, more complete article, it's stated that employees had a good chance to ask questions before the emails, and meet with management staff after the emails.
To be honest, it does sound a bit dehumanising with the way it's being reported, but put in a different context, it could also be that sending the actual notifications via email (after sufficient warning) was simply the best way to do it, for everyone, in that particular business.
Maybe the company had an "A Team".
I used to be a technician at a plant where the day shift had what we referred to as the "A Team", a group of mostly polictical appointees deigned to be the best design and problem solvers we had, so deigned by their buddies the management. Additionally there was only one good tech on the graveyard shift and once when he was on vacation one of the machines went down and stayed down till dayshift arrived and the A Team decided to take charge of the machine's repair. When my 2nd shift came on we were instructed the machine was down for repairs and not to touch it as it was under the control of the A Team. After discussing the issue with the graveyard crew when they came on that night we had a pretty good guess as to what was wrong with it, which brought us puzzled looks from the graveyard crew. We left a note for the A Team with our suggestion and went home for the night, when we arrived the next day we were told our guess was wrong, they had not checked it mind you but they "knew" we were wrong. Three days later the machine was still down but they wanted us to do some routine maintenance on the machine while it was down. Thus with permission to work on the machine we proceeded to do the routine maintenance and while we were at it slipped a new latch relay into the control circuit ran by the cam timer. The next morning the "A Team" "fixed" the machine. We were greeted with some evil looks when we came in that night.
Amusingly when the one decent third shift tech returned from vacation his fellow shift techs were telling him about it and he asked them "did you replace the latch relay on that cam timer circuit?" He just shook his head when they said it was turned over to the "A Team" and was down several days. Noticing us laughing into our hands and looking at us with quizzical eyes we simply said: "after a few days they had us perform general maintenance on the machine and then the next day they fixed it." He was still laughing when we clocked out.
Many years ago I was working as a system admin for one of the largest computer companies in the world. We were going thru some major downsizing. Our standard procedure was at the end of the day, we were shown a list of employees who were being let go, our computer operators would disable their accounts that evening. The employee would show up next morning and the person's manager/supervisor would then inform them of the bad news and would walk them to their desk and let them clean it out and escort them out the door.
Of course, the person's manager/supervisor would be too cowardly to show up on time on the day the employee was being let go. The employee would show up at say, 8:00 a.m on the boss would show up at 9:15-9:30 (deliberately late). When the employee couldn't log into their account, they would phone the system admin (me) and ask me to reset their password. I told them I couldn't do that (because their name had been on the termination list the previous day) and they were annoyed at me for refusing to do so. I asked them to talk to their manager (who wasn't there). After a while people had heard about this. The next time they couldn't log in, they would phone me and when I told them I couldn't enable their account, they would say "am I getting let go", and I would hear the "I just bought a house", "my wife is pregnant", etc. They shouldn't have to hear that they were being let go from me. It just shows you how cowardly the local manager of that person was.
Once we had people with the same first initial and last name (such as Carol Brown with login name of cbrown and Christine Brown with login name of crbrown). Lets say that Christine (crbrown) was being let go. The computer operators disabled cbrown (Carol's account) instead. Carol Brown thought that she was being let go when she couldn't log in.
Someone later told her "sorry for the incovenience".
My boss works two hours from my site. I had been with the company for 30 years. When it was time to let me know that I was history, my boss wanted to drive to where I work and tell me in person. My boss's boss didn't want to pay mileage so I got the info via phone.
What a company.
Companies are soulless and heartless. I am surprised more people don't go postal these days. Also, when people are let go, the workload doesn't go with them, its dumped on the poor suckers who remain behind.
I once worked for a small ISP that was bought by a big ISP. The big ISP layed us all off only to bring us back a few weeks later because they didn't know how the stuff worked. Then they moved us to their home office. I worked there for a few years. I got a girlfriend and we were going to get an appartment. I noticed the signs that they would be doing a layoff soon. So I approached my boss and told him I was going to sign a lease on a new appartment (with increased costs) tomarrow and I wanted to make sure my job was secure. He said it was secure and the layoff rumors were just rumers. Then he reminded me of our saturday morning meeting to cover policy changes. So I went home, signed my new lease, work up saturday morning and went to work for the meeting. When I got to the meeting we were told we were all being layed off and asked to sign a Non disclusure agreement to get our last paycheck. I walked up to my boss, put my fist though the wall directly next to his head and left. My paycheck came on time.
I was one of those nerdy geeks as well. Worked at RS while attending high school & college back in the early 1980's. I created a spreadsheet in VisiCalc to help the manager with inventory allocation -- it got distributed all over the company. The job was a joke, as was the company. Management was really dumb, even for retail! It's hard to believe they are still in business.
You are correct about the parts. Margins on those were tremendous, and local competition was non-existant. They had the PC market cornered at one point, and they blew it. To an extent, customers are the problem. They are quite content to shop where competent people give reasonable advice, and then make the actual purchase at a big-box store where nobody knows anything but the price is right.
RS would love to be a mainstream electronics retailer, but their prices were not competitive. Either they did a poor job of negotiating and their cost was too high, or they did a poor job of analyzing competitor's prices. Or maybe they drowned themselves with internal overhead costs. They also had their inventory spread out too thin over too many stores. Although they tried to be the 7-11 of electronics, the typical customer seldom found what he wanted at the first RS he visited. Some convenience!
I'm told they did well in remote sections of the country where they didn't face big-box competition. Sure didn't pan out that way where I lived.
Business practices, wages, working conditions all pretty much sucked. If I were one of the employees getting those e-mails, I would look forward to getting a raise at my next job. It would be hard to find anything that pays less.
I was laid off via an email back in aught-three, albeit inadvertently.
I had sent an email to a client in which I had CC'd my boss-man (the owner). He replied to the client with, "Please send all future correspondance on this subject to me." Not being in full control of his email client, I was included in the recipient list.
The next morning was quite entertaining. I ended up coaching him through how to publicize the layoffs to the remaining staff. It makes for a good story. Now.
I'd made a post earlier that I really didn't see the big deal of being let go by email. I actually thought it would be a bit easier in that you didn't have to sit there and feel uncomfortable in front of a person having to tell you in person. I just didn't get it, but, then I read your post and maybe I do. The part where you liken losing your job of 8 years to having your life 'flushed down the toilet'. Wow...I've just guessed I never associated my work/job with my life or self worth before as it seems you may do. I guess there are a good many of people out there that associate their job with their self worth or image. That's just foreign to me.
Don't get me wrong, I like my job...I'm often passionate about my interest in what I do, that happens to also earn me a living...a good one. But, it is just a job. Where I do it, and who for really isn't the biggest deal in my life. The second I leave work...I completely leave it (unless on call or something). I don't really think about it till I walk back in the door the next day. I don't have any loyalty really towards any company, because I feel in this age, they have none towards me. But, I've felt that for a long time. Currently, I'm in a semi-contract mode...W2 hourly employee for a contract company. Work is good, pay is good, benefits are good. I'm friends with the owner of the company and often have drinks with him. I'm a good employee and contribute to the company. But, if I got the ax tomorrow...and it could happen as that the area I'm in is New Orleans...well, I'd take a little hit on my pride, but, mostly just worry about getting the next gig.
But, losing my job, doesn't really mean I lost something that defines me. I work ONLY to make money...to enable me to buy and do things that make me happy. If I won the lottery tomorrow, trust me..I'd never work again, I'd do nothing but stuff that was fun.
I guess that explains a lot of the posts I read here...I was actually shocked that so many people described the firing process so emotionally...and took it so personally. I didn't realize that the job people hold defines them so much. And I think that is sad.
A job should be nothing more than a means to supporting your lifestyle. Sure...hopefully you can enjoy your work, but, really...does it matter who you do it for? Your job should not be YOU.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
A job is basically an exchange of skill and effort for currency. In some cases the measurement of skill and effort is based on hours worked, and those employed in this way are called hourly workers or contractors. In other cases skill and effort is not measured, these permanent employees are given a guaranteed salary. Contrary to what the term permanent implies, in both cases the majority of jobs are actually at will, which means that either the employee or the employer may terminate the relationship at any time, for almost any reason.
It should be noted that it is the employer that invokes at will termination in the vast majority of cases.
If you don't know the person who signs your paycheck, they don't know you. You're just a number on a spreadsheet. Quit now before they realize you're number is too big.
Because of this I wont be buying anything from them anytime soon (they are called "The Source" here in Canada). Oh wait...because of their prices I don't buy from them anyways...being so inpersonal with their employees makes you wonder just what kind of level of service they can actually provide to a customer once he's paid for something How hard is it to actually tell someone in person that he/she is being let go? Yes it's not a given but is a much better method than emailing someone.
I've heard stories where they having something like a fire drill or a company meeting, to get people away from their desks. While outside, the IT departement is busy revoking access. Then they call out the people who get fired/laid off and escort them to their desks to get their belongings.
When a man lies he murders a part of the world.
Sigh...I remember when I was five or six. I'd go to Radio shack and get my grandfather to buy half the items on the shelf, including four or five breadboards.
Then I'd go home, and plug things together until I had odd little circuits. Most of them didn't work, but some of them did. And some of them surprised me. I remember taking a tuning knob out of a CB and stuffed it into a breadboard. I didn't really expect the circuit to work; I just wanted to see a tuning knob sticking out of a breadboard. I was shocked when the speaker made rhythmic clicking sounds.
Yes, my favorite movie at the time was Short Circuit. But I chose my CB handle at the time (and then my BBS handle, and then my Slashdot handle) based on my interest in electronics.
My first exposure to electronics was a Radioshack children's kit, the Robot20. Then I upgraded to their 200 kit, and then the 300.
Ah...memories.
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Does anyone know of any other countries where such childish, sensless, brutal, inhumane and counterproductive employee termination techniques are used? My former (U.S. based) company used voice mail on recent firees (They couldn't fire me, I quit way ahead of time! ;-). The U.S. division of my current company uses immediate firing within the U.S. but employees outside of the U.S. are generally given time to get things in order, finish what they were working on, use company resources in the job hunt and talk to collegues to help ease the transition. This technique works! I've never heard of a case of an employee going postal or sabatoging the company here.
So is it U.S. employees, U.S. managers or U.S. HR people who are being childish?
I have a friend who was working in Europe when they decided that they were closing up a section of the big IT company he was working for. He was on contract and happened to avoid the cut, but he witnessed another employee walk into a common area and detach a large LCD screen from the wall (others were taking CRT monitors, laptops, etc).
That's sort of 'collecting severance' I suppose. The funny bit is that the manager, also axed, walked in and caught the guy detaching the big LCD TV from the wall. (Maybe it was plasma... doesn't matter). Anyway, instead of kicking his @$$ and sticking security on him for a quick lesson in the use of the PR-24, he *HELPED* the employee dismount the screen and transport it out to his vehicle.
It seems the (former) manager had a lot of sympathy for his (former) employees that day and wasn't particularly interested (any longer) in the interests of the company, especially since it was shipping off a whole whack of work to the Pacific Rim.
I'm not saying this sort of behaviour is right, but the way some business decisions get made and implemented, you find it hard at times to have much sympathy for the company.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."