Slashdot Mirror
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."
0wned!
Listen p*ssy. I'm sure your the same homo that posted earlier about alf's boner and you just want to remain anonymous fo
Let's get a hand for RadioShack and their PR skills! I've always wondered when things along this line would start to happen. I'm surprised it didn't become popular to fire people by voicemail when that was the "new" thing. Firings can become a very confrontational situation (especially since the messenger didn't always have a hand in the process), so I wonder if the messenger decided that email would be better than hell.
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!
One of the guys who received that mail should have followed it up with a mail to everyone@radioshack :
"Pls ignore the previous mail.It was a prank mail by someone."
Wincopy
Laid-off workers got one to three weeks pay for each year of service, up to 16 weeks for hourly employees and 36 weeks for those with base bay of at least $90,000, the company said.
Hey, at least they are taking care of their upper management with up to 36 weeks of severence pay. Otherwise, they might have to actually give up a whole week of vacation in the Bahamas! Who cares about the nameless masses below them. That's why they are nameless masses!
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
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
Radio Shack is now Radio Sack
Wincopy
Mr. Kim: You got a message.
Korben Dallas: Yeah.
Mr. Kim: You're not gonna open it? It might be important.
Korben Dallas: Yeah, like the last two I got were important. The first one was from my wife, telling me she was leaving. The second was from my lawyer, telling me he was leaving... with my wife.
Mr. Kim: Aigh, that is bad luck. But grandfather say 'It never rain everyday'. This is good news, guaranteed. Hey, I bet your lunch.
Korben Dallas: Okay, you're on.
Mr. Kim: Come on. [opens message, in a excited voice] 'You are fired'. Oh, I'm sorry.
Korben Dallas: At least I won lunch.
Mr. Kim: Good philosophy, see good in bad, I like.
I also disagree with this being "soul-destroying," but for a slightly different reason. It could have been a lot worse - TFA says that there were multiple face-to-face meetings prior to the announcement, with an opportunity for employees to ask questions. There was also a severance package. It wasn't the best way to approach the problem, but at least it wasn't unexpected.
SpamAssassin could actually save your job. Alternatively, with sufficient supples of bandwidth and Mountain Dew, one of these employees ought to just do a cut & paste job on the e-pink slip (like so)... then spam the whole Radio Shack domain with it. Why not fire everyone, and score some kind of FuckedCompany record? ;-)
News Flash: Godzilla hates infrastructure.
In the early 80's I was a CPU designer at a large mainframe company that was going through waves of RIF's. All layoff's always happened on Friday, and the sysadmins were always given a list of userid's to disable before hand. So, it became a regular Friday morning ritual for everyone to get a cup of joe, joke about whether their login would work, and see if they could get on the system. An officemate typed his password incorrectly one Friday and nearly crapped. Most victims had their desk half cleaned out before their manager found them.
Heck, at least these people got an e-mail.
...a guy from an African nation in the very next message promised to give me a new job if I help him with an international transaction.
Table-ized A.I.
My worst ever: I was trying to buy an adapter so I could plug an old IBM Model M keyboard (with the old AT / 5-pin DIN style connector) into a newer computer (Mini-DIN 6-pin / PS/2). The employee, who I could swear was a robot, kept completely disregarding everything I said; just the look on their face made it obvious they were filtering out all the things they didn't understand, which basically meant they were hearing, "I need a thingy that makes a thingus be able to attach to a thingeroo it's not supposed to attach to.", I guess...and then they would say, "Yeah, we have that." *points at drawers where they keep all the capacitors, resistors, etc.* After the third attempt to explain what I needed to them, they got all exasperated, walked over the the drawers, and pulled out the drawer containing...alligator clips. GAH! I came within an inch of an aneurysm, I swear...
Unpleasantries.
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?
Somehow this feels like the best idea in this whole thread. It would probably put an end to the practice pretty quickly with a well placed public backfire.
sorry for the pun...
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
"Common decency" ... hmm, maybe exists in some 50s romantic B-movie comedies, but alas, welcome to the real world pal. That stuff never existed. Read your histories of work and industry through the ages. Watch a few Monty Python sketches if that's too boring (something about working in coal mines and getting up at 5am and being grateful for it: Victorian decency didn't have a problem with sending 5 year olds down mines and up chimneys after all). That's why unions got going in the first place, to actually give the little guys some real power rather than having individuals just sitting at home feeling shocked after layoff at the wake up call that they weren't actually working for a paternalistic social enterprise.
If you don't like the word 'union' then pick another, but you need some sort of collective ability to organise and respond when the big guys put the pressure on. They screw around with your workmates, you all stop work and threaten to take the company down if they don't start behaving better. Drastic, sure, but the USA is *proud* of its free market hire em and fire em attitude, you aren't going to get some middle manager to change their way by asking them to remember the unwritten rules of Lord's cricket ground and the British Raj. They are watching over their shoulder as well...
The news in this is that we've reached that particular point in our society where a corporation doesn't even have to have the common decency to fire people in person.
What kind of phantasy world do you live in? Labor rights and relations have come a long way since the 19th centuries; companies didn't use to fire employees by E-mail, they used to work them to death and kill them.
You're confusing a company with a thinking, feeling person. Companies are like big, impersonal machines, and they have always been. Complaining about being fired by E-mail makes just about as much sense as taking the BSOD or a washing machine malfunction as a personal insult. The company doesn't want you anymore, so just move on. If people get fired too often in your opinion, then the solution is to fix the system (by working for more labor rights), not to whine about the form in which you get fired.
Congrats, you should be a manager, maybe even a board member or CEO, if your view of the world is that sociopathic.
Human interactions are not measured just in how many dollars they make for your (or their) bottom line. Sometimes you can take 5 minutes off your busy schedule just, you know, for the sake of making someone's day less shitty. Just because it's the humane thing to do. Someone has just been fired, and it won't kill you to just say a few soothing words and show (or fake) some compassion. Or just show that someone at least remembers their name, or that they worked there. Put a human/humane face on the whole deal, you know.
Yes, being fired is just normal and just part of how the economy works. It's not the end of the world. Etc. But it's still a stressful event in someone's life. It won't kill you to lower someone's stress a little.
It's also an awakening to the cruel reality that, for all the bullshit "we're all a big family" speeches, you're just a nameless disposable cog in the corporate machine. A cog that's served its purpose, produced all the profit that could be made, and now is disposed of when no longer profitable. All the "we're all a big family" idea not only flies out the window, but it turns out that it's never been true anyway. That's not how families work.
And that's not a cheerful thought. Humans aren't robots, and the millions of years of evolution have sorta hard-wired us to be social beings. Our brains are wired for person-to-person relations, not for a nameless-cog-to-faceless-entity existence. That's too why we build father figures in the sky (i.e., religion), or conspiracy theories with a few people responsible for all this or that, or anthropomorphise our computer/boat/gun/whatever. Because that's the kind of thing we're wired for, and the kind of thing we understand: _people_, not faceless machineries.
And the kind of email oozing an "you're one of the nameless drones we're discarding today" tone, like these people received, only serve to amplify that to the maximum impact possible. It's just twisting the knife in the wound. In the ammo arsenal of unpleasant human interactions, this is the dum-dum.
And if you're willing to advocate that just because the humane alternative is "just a total logistical nightmare"... well, as I was saying, you have some serious upper management potential.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
Can you hear me now? Good. You're fired! Can you hear me now? Good. You're fired!
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
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.........
I'm surprised that the email spammers weren't all over this one. All you'd need to do is find out what email addy those emails were sent out from... and then dictionary spam the radioshack email addy's with that message. In Current News... 90% of radioshack employees did not show up for work today as they all thought they were fired. lol gg.