End of Stores and Career

This week featured 2 interesting news stories.

The first one was the stepping down of Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel in the wake of the data breach during the holiday season last year. For someone who has been with the company for over 30 years, this departure seems rather odd.

According to reports, Steinhafel claims that he is personally responsible for what happened at the company.

Seriously.

The people who are really responsible for this nightmare are the people who ignored the fact that the breach even occurred and did nothing about it.

Not only should these people be fired, but should be held accountable for what happened.

Maybe the CEO resigned because there is a bigger problem that has yet to be uncovered and wants to run away fast before everything collapses around him and the company.

Certainly he may be playing damage control, but leaving suddenly just adds suspicion to any future damage that could happen.

I expect that we have not heard the end of the data breach and I still believe that there will be others that have yet revealed themselves.

The second story of the week was the closure of at least to 400 stores of Office Depot.

While it is not surprising of the store closures since the merger of Office Depot and OfficeMax, it is surprising by the number of stores to be closed. What is interesting is that the companies seem to be doing better as one, the massive number of closings leads suspicion of the health of the company.

Let me point out that Office Depot said “at least” 400 stores in the next 2 years (150 this year alone), which means that this could be a low number possibly a severely low number. While the 2 companies probably want to close stores in areas where they compete against themselves, it seems that the company may also want to close low performing stores just like Staples and RadioShack have announced in the past months.

So this leads me to this question: why do these companies announce how many stores they plan on closing in their earnings report?

Is it because they want to impress/depress their shareholders into what their future is whether it is good or bad? Or is it that they want to warn other retailers of their failings?

Either way, I don’t know why companies can’t just quietly closing stores a few at a time without making such a big deal of it.

I remember back when Woolworth announced that it was closing half of their stores, we got endless phone calls from the media asking if our location was one to close. Our response was “no, but further details can be obtained by calling our home office”. It took about 3 days for the attention to go away, but our store’s future was still questioned until the company finally went out of business.

So while Staples, RadioShack, and Office Depot announce massive store closings, the real question on everybody’s mind is which ones will be affected and what the future of the employees at that location is.

I believe that Mr. Steinhafel will have plenty of company on the unemployment line very soon.

However, all of them will have to get behind me as I am still there.