Slashdot Mirror
Circuit City and the American Dream
An anonymous reader writes "Circuit City said yesterday that it had fired 3,400 of its highest-paid sales staff — 8% of its employees — and will replace them with lower-paid workers. Sign On San Diego called this 'a risky strategy to cut costs that goes beyond the layoffs, buyouts and hiring freezes commonly used by struggling companies.' The fired workers have a chance to apply for lower-paying positions after a 10-week wait, the company said. Quoting a Circuit City spokesman: 'This is no reflection on job performance... We deeply regret the negative impact. Retail is extremely competitive, and if we're going to thrive and operate a successful company... we just have to control costs.' So: work hard, become the best in your field, and get fired so they can offer you a new job 10 weeks later at a lower salary."
During my time in college I worked for both Circuit City and Best Buy in the same town. Overall I think CC treated their employees better. Everyone wants to boycott CC for screwing their employees over but they're missing a few important bits of information on how things work there. I'll see if I can shed some light. When CC went from commission to non-commissoned sales they gave their old employees one HELL of a deal. They tallied up everything the employee had made in the previous year (including comissions) and made that their new hourly wage. We had people at our store making $19 dollars an hour because of this. $19 an hour........selling digital cameras. Compare this to the $9.50 an hour that someone who came in after the commission/non-commision switch, and you can easily see that there were a lot of SERIOUSLY overpaid sales staff. These people weren't necessarily the best salesman they were just the ones that had happened to have been around at the right time. So this is not a killer of the american dream. This is not a case of canning people who have worked their way up the sales ladder. This is merely cutting some bloat, getting the labor prices back down to reasonable levels. Having been an employee (one of the $9.50 ones) I can say: good for them! Some of the $19 an hour people were WORSE salesman than I was. Now they can possibly get to a situation where people get raises based on merit as opposed to not being able to afford to give ANYONE raises because you have emplyoees being paid twice what they're worth.