Quotas – We Got That

You know the concept.  You hear it often.  Quite frequently especially in car ads.  The dealer says we have to sell X number of vehicles before X date.  They never say why or even after the sale period is over whether they ever made their goal.  Thus this is the big problem with quotas.  Numbers created to seem like a sense of urgency to the consumer as if they are responsible to keep a dealer in business.  Sad to say, some people actually fall for this gimmick. 

Quotas are also used to push individuals to levels that they no they can’t really achieve.  Imagine a coach saying to a pole-vaulter the following:

“I am setting this rod on the ground-now vault over it”.

Not a problem since the rod is on the ground.  The coach then continuously raises the rod an inch after every vault.  The pole-vaulter is successful the first many times, but then comes the point that the pole-vaulter can’t get over the rod because it is just too high.  However, the coach is insistent that the pole-vaulter succeed or else they will be removed from the team.  At this point, the pole-vaulter can either quit or be removed by the coach.  Eventually, the bar was raised to high even for the best athletes.  There is always that level that is too high.

Relating quotas back to my earliest employment started with Woolworth. Back then, the floor employees (not me, thankfully) were required to turn in weekly damage reports to Store Manager Bernie. Every floor employee had to turn in X number of sheets per week valued at X amount of dollars per week. This was Bernie’s requirement having ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the company. These damage reports were a way to defraud manufacturers of delivered goods to the store by writing them off instead of selling them. The big problem for Bernie was that he had to make sure that everyone was doing their job on these reports as he didn’t want to fire anyone for non-compliance. Bernie did occasionally verbally reprimand employees for failure, but never fired anyone. Certainly if any employee was fired, they would probably report Bernie for fraud, so this kept Bernie and the employees in line. What really was bad about this whole thing was how hush-hush everyone was about this fraud. Eventually, this fraud caught up with the company and Bernie was shown the door. Sadly it took about 4 years and quite possibly as much as $50,000 in write-offs to make the company see what was going on. Ironically, Bernie’s successor, Mikey rarely used if ever these damage reports and with that employee quotas disappeared off Woolworth’s radar.

Most of my existence with Staples never had quotas either until Shawn Nichols appeared. Much in the same vein as Bernie did, Shawn used quotas for a purpose of evil and punishment to those who didn’t live up to his expectations. For the floor people (again, not me), quotas were placed on employees to have X number of service plans sold per week.  I will have much more to say on these plans in a future post.  For the cashiers (me included), the quotas were placed upon the number of service plans sold in addition to number of new rewards cards signed up by customers. 

And there lies the problem.  Shawn with his twisted thoughts believed that those who work the most number of hours and have the most seniority should be able to sell the most plans and also get the most rewards card sign-ups.  As I pointed out in my previous post, this couldn’t be furthest from the truth and the furthest from reality.  Shawn had raised the rod so high that nobody could ever reasonably reach their goals.  Thus came the reprimanding.  Not just occasionally, but weekly to the point of extremes.  It came to the point of getting written up multiple times for my “failure to succeed” with his desired numbers.  Eventually, his quackery numbers would force me out of the company (his lame excuse for termination), leaving me wondering why.  That “why” would come to light at my day of termination and it had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with his voodoo numbers game.  Stay tuned for the REAL REASON….

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Commentary:

It should be quite obvious that I HATE quotas.  They are nothing more than a bar raised too high that can NEVER be achieved.  When some crackpot manager like Shawn Nichols sets the bar too high, it should be obvious that there is something else driving his agenda.  That agenda was totally revealed at my day of termination, which was later denied by Shawn in my lawsuit against Staples.  What makes this whole thing even worse is that Shawn had been out of the company himself for about 6 months when my lawsuit came up to the state.  He had a sworn written affidavit lying about what he said to me in person on day of my termination.  The bad thing about this affidavit is that when I requested a copy of it, I was denied it.  Another Staples lie about a piece of paper that doesn’t exist.  Gee, would Staples REALLY do that?  If you have been reading this blog on a regular basis, then you already know the answer to that one.  If you haven’t been reading, then you seriously don’t hate Staples.  Between Bernie and Shawn, it should be obvious that quotas are for the minds of the criminals only and should never be used to judge another employee’s performance.  Sadly, quotas cost both of them their jobs.  Then again, maybe quotas are a good thing in a way.

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