Future Mergers?

A couple of weeks ago, Staples announced their quarterly earnings.

Most of the transcript that I read sounded more like the type of gloom and doom that was expected from the company.

Sales are not as good as they have been.

The company wants to shut about 140 stores by year’s end.

The company is shrinking the floor space of their stores as they try to downsize their footprint in the retail world.

And finally, the company is not using weather as an excuse this last quarter for its dismal performance.

So with so much bad news, isn’t it funny that a little bit of sarcasm was injected into the last quarter’s report conference call?

Simply put, one caller wanted to see if putting a Starbucks into Staples stores might help improve traffic and make people want to shop there.

Certainly such an idea should and was laughed off as some sort of joke but truth be told that the company has to do something to help it try to survive in the future.

After this report came out, the company’s stock took a smaller hit than normal, but was still down. However over the last couple of days the stock has gone up to nearly $13/share. So what is happening with the company?

It seems as though Credit Suisse thinks that a Staples/Office Depot would be great for both companies. They assume that the stock would go up to $30/share and that the remaining 2 companies would work great together.

However, I don’t believe this for one moment. The truth is that a merger was denied by the federal regulators last time and I don’t think it would happen now either, so all these people are going on false pretenses of something that could never happen. I expect that the bubble will burst soon in this stock sending it plunging below $10/share very soon.

It may come as late as next earnings report as it seems that the back to school season looks more like bust than a boom.

Why do I say that you ask? Here are some of my observations locally (of course without stepping into a Staples store):

· The Staples ads have been awful this BTS season. People dancing and jumping around just made me nauseous. Nothing was memorable in any of the ads. Target and Walmart ads were no better and quite forgettable.

· Plenty of knapsacks and lunch bags still available at Target and Walmart. This is a sure sign that kids will be using last year’s gear for another year. Unfortunately, this year it seemed that licensed products were quite limited and seems to be a repeat of merchandise of years past.

· Plenty of general school supplies like pens, pencils and paper. Again, it seems parents over bought last year so they have plenty.

· One stop shopping. Forget the ads as everyone seems to be price matching everybody else.

· It seems that from the ads that Staples got rid of that horrible shopping pass that they had the last couple of years. Who really would pay to get a discount? Hopefully that never comes back again.

I don’t believe that any of the stores will have a great back to school season as it seems even this late in the season there is still more than plenty of product on the shelf.

Maybe a Starbucks/Staples/Office Depot merger might be a better idea.

Or maybe not.

Update on Market Basket:

Last time I said that Arthur T. Demoulas wanted to buy the company. Well, since then, he bought the company for $1.5 billion and it seemed almost immediately that the company came back to life.

Our family visited the local store this week and found the store about 70% restocked, but there were many products on the shelves that were at or near their expiration dates. I believe that it will be about another couple of weeks to get new products on all their shelves. However, it seemed nice to shop at a store where employees actually like to work unlike companies like Staples. Market Basket is a model company where the employees are actually happy on their job and it definitely shows.

Market Basketcase

Welcome to the Family Feud Retail Edition!

On one side we have Arthur T. Demoulas (ATD), former CEO of grocery store chain Market Basket.

On the other side we have Arthur S. Demoulas (ASD) who terminated his cousin ATD and has taken over the company.

Well, all would be all good if ASD didn’t want to make some major changes to the company.

First off, let me say that up to about six weeks ago, our family would make the 20 mile trip to the Market Basket grocery store in Biddeford Maine. The trip was well worth every time as the savings were significant. Along with the 4% discount that the company offers on most items, their prices were lower than any of the competitors.

The store was always extremely busy and always had about 2/3 of their registers open during the day.

That was until hell broke loose.

About six weeks ago, the employees started picketing the store about how the company was being operated.

They wanted customers to sign their petitions to give to the board of directors.

I was tempted to sign their petition as they were telling me their gripes.

Amongst their gripes was reduction of hours, change of benefits, and pay cuts.

However it was the last thing they said was the deal breaker and that was that the company had intended to close the Biddeford Maine store.

At that point, I walked inside to start my shopping with my family.

So what was wrong that made me not want to sign: at no point has anybody EVER said that the Biddeford Maine store would ever be closed especially since this store was one of the largest and more profitable stores in the chain. It was also the only one in Maine and has only been open for about a year and occupied the former Lowe’s location.

So my thought was this employee was embellishing his gripes by a falsehood, therefore he wanted to make his story seem even more sad.

However, walking through the store, it was obvious with many empty shelves especially in the dairy and produce sections that fresh products were not going to be available. Overall, we spent about 20 minutes in the store getting a few items and waited nearly that long at the one cashier that was open. Our family decided not to return until everything is settled with the company. And of course, shelves restocked again.

Of course, in that time nothing has been settled and at the time of this writing the following things have happened:

· ATD has offered to buy the company but the board has rejected the offer.

· Part time employees have been eliminated in the local stores and full time employees have reduced hours to compensate for the loss of business.

· Rallies at the home office in Massachusetts by both employees and customers have fallen on deaf ears.

· Employees have been told to get back to work or they would be fired.

· Job fairs were set up to hire new replacement employees.

Overall, this is a very troubled company with employees and customers both fighting against ATD and the board of directors. It seems that neither side is giving in and no end is in sight.

Now, you are probably asking yourself, why am I talking about this company on a anti-Staples blog?

The answer is very simple.

During the last 3 years of my existence with Staples, while the management didn’t change, much of how the company was run did.

Most of the effects applied to full-timers like myself were, but also many applied to the part-timers as well. Amongst the changes were (as of 5 years ago):

· Full time hours were cut from 40 hours per week down to 37 ½ per week. (no notice given)

· How vacation time was allocated and accrued despite agreement at time of hire (again no notice given to the change).

· Benefits reduced at slightly higher cost, not including that when I went on COBRA the benefits went up by a percentage greater than 3000% (not a typo). Of course there was warning about this which is why I cancelled.

· Raises during the last 3 years amounted to less than 25 cents total for the entire time. This was when the company was still expanding and managers were still making sizable bonuses while hourly employees got crap.

There is however one major difference between Market Basket employees and Staples employees and that is that Staples employees could not under any circumstances picket or rally at the stores or at the home office. Doing so would lead to immediate termination.

Since neither company has union employees, it appears that Market Basket is heading in the same direction that Staples is heading in. The big difference is that the management at Staples has not changed whereas the management at Market Basket has. Also customers did not rally in support of the losses that Staples employees were getting because the Staples employees never spoke up because they knew if they did they would get terminated.

Unfortunately, for both companies, it is the management that holds the employees hostage. They can either live with it or they can leave at their own free will.

Fortunately, or unfortunately for me, I had the choice made for me.

What the Hobby Lobby Case REALLY Means

A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court made a ruling in favor of the company Hobby Lobby regarding birth control. In essence, the court decided that the company can prevent women in having 4 types of birth control medications based upon the company’s religious beliefs.

Now I have never been to a Hobby Lobby store nor do I ever plan to. The nearest one to where I live is over 75 miles away and the one in state is nearly 100 miles away. Like the company Chick-fil-A, they are not open on Sundays based upon their religious beliefs.

The big problem that I have with the Hobby Lobby case and one that really can’t be ignored is that this case could be interpreted as giving companies (any company whatsoever) to establish what type of healthcare that any of its employees can receive regardless of what type of care that the employee wants or needs.

Let me reiterate this: your employer will be able to determine what kind of healthcare you can receive and if they don’t like it, well tough luck.

This was exactly what happened to me back when I worked at Staples. I was out of work for nearly 3 weeks when I had a work-related (yes, I said WORK-RELATED) illness. During the time I was out, I received a letter from Staples stating that if I didn’t follow their rules regarding my healthcare, I would be terminated even though those “rules” were never made explicit in any paperwork that I had ever received during my employment with the company. When I brought the letter to the management, they just laughed at the letter as if it didn’t matter at all.

The bad thing is that apparently it DID matter as I was terminated less than 9 months later after my health did not improve and they got tired of dealing with me.

So now you are probably asking yourself, why didn’t I sue the company?

The truth is that I went through the proper channels to get a resolution despite the fact that I didn’t have a lawyer and had to represent myself in a very bad case. What was worse was that neither the state nor federal government did their job properly, which forced my case to be ultimately dismissed and having Staples get away with all the lies that they had built up against me over the years. I will be explaining all of this in further detail in future blog posts.

So, overall, my belief is that Staples along with any company now basically has free rein to allow/disallow anything regarding healthcare that they want. As long as you are under an employee’s health plan, they can do what they want and like with Staples, they don’t even have to tell you ahead of time.

Certainly this is not a result that any employee should be happy about especially those at Hobby Lobby and Staples.

Half-Year Reflection

Please note: This week’s writing is being posted in all my blogs as it is important to all of my published blogs.

You may have noticed that there has not been a blog post in any of my blogs for the last couple of weeks. There are a few reasons for that.

Among the most important reasons are the following:

· Weather plays havoc with my equipment so I remain offline and disconnected when the heat is high.

· My brain had run out of ideas to write about for a while.

· I was evaluating the stats to determine the future of my blogs.

Certainly anybody who has been reading my blogs recently will realize that I have had a difficult last couple of months. While I tried to put as much of a positive spin on what was happening around me, it seemed that I failed with that attempt. I don’t feel that I really did anything wrong, I was just misinterpreted.

As I mentioned in the past, I am always open to topic ideas in any of my blogs. So far, I have received only 1 idea which I plan on discussing in the next month or so. I am also open to guest bloggers who want to step up and write articles for any of my blogs. Since this has been a one-person operation, sometimes my quality seems to have waned at times. If anybody is interested in submitting ideas or wants to be a guest writer, feel free to email me at the address at the right. Please note that I accept both anonymous and named submissions, if you want the credit for it.

My other thing I have been doing is reevaluating how frequently I post to my blogs. Usually, my writings have been on Wednesdays allowing me to judge the acceptance on Thursdays. Lately, it seems that the numbers have been fairly light and the lack of “likes” and comments make me wonder what the public really want and what they don’t.

So, effective immediately, I have decided that I will be publishing a lot less in the foreseeable future. My plan is to update my blogs approximately twice a month per blog. However, this number could go up or down depending on desire of topics and anything that I come across that I deem to be important to discuss. I also plan on staggering the posting of my blogs so that both are not posted in the same week, but that could change as well. This choice was not easy, but I felt that it was in everybody’s best interest including my own sanity.

Overall, I expect that both the “Staples” blog and the “Rants” blog will continue for a long time as long as I take it a little slower. Hopefully, everyone will agree on that.

Bad or Worse

Writer’s note: This week’s post is being presented in all my blogs as I feel that the information is important enough to be told to all audiences.

All right class.

This week’s word is bad.

It is such a simple 3 letter word.

However its meaning is quite vast.

It could mean defective. It could mean evil. It could mean awful. It could mean any number of things.

Back in the 1980’s Michael Jackson sang about “being bad”.

Back then, Jessica Rabbit stated that “she wasn’t bad, she was drawn that way”.

Last weekend on Facebook, a friend of mine stated that they thought they were a “bad person” because they had no father figure in her life and she was going to spend Father’s Day with her daughter.

To me, this is certainly not the making of a “bad person”, but to some people they like to jump to conclusions with little or no evidence. I will get back to that in a bit.

But first, let me rewind time back to last Wednesday, June 11. That day everything seemed normal as I had just put my weekly blog posts online and was done for the day. I decided to do my normal checking in on my ex Tanya on Facebook as I normally do. Granted I had never friended her nor did really ever intend to, but I am still curious about her post-wedding life. For those who read my open letter to her a couple of weeks ago would realize that she still holds a special place with me despite being married to someone else. There seemed to be nothing new on her page or her husband’s, as I regularly checked his too after they got engaged.

So I closed down and called it a day.

Then came Thursday June 12 and well let’s just say something was very wrong.

My first thing that I normally do is check my Twitter account. I usually check to see if I have any new followers or lost any old ones. I had noticed that a couple of people that I had followed seemed to have disappeared.

So just for the heck of it, I checked Tanya's profile and noticed that she had 1 less followers. Granted, she has never tweeted anything so following her may seem counterproductive. When I checked her list of followers, I noticed that I (yes, me) was no longer a follower of hers.

I had wondered what happened.

So I decided to try and re-follow her.

Apparently that was NOT going to happen as she appeared to have blocked me on Twitter. I, then decided to check her husband’s account as well. Even though I never followed him, I was blocked there as well when I tried to follow him.

Ok, this is not good. Not good at all.

So then I decided to go to my Facebook account.

I did a search on her and her page did not come up. I tried typing in the URL that would lead directly to her page and got a “page not found” message. I then repeated the same thing with her husband and received the same result.

At this point, I decided to log into my alternative Facebook account where I am not under my name, and low and behold BOTH of their Facebook accounts were there in all their glory.

So now it was quite apparent.

I was blocked not only by her, but by her husband as well, somebody who has never met me, seen me, or know anything about me at all.

So here I was blocked on both Facebook and Twitter by both of them with no real justification.

At this point, I was shocked and wrote a quick post on Facebook stating that feeling.

Before I get into the response to that, let me just say that I really don’t know what made Tanya to block me. The only thing I would think is that somehow she might have gotten wind of my open letter and somehow might have been offended or angered by it. While I don’t believe that I said anything offensive, she decided that it was best to slam the door on me on as much social media as possible. To add her husband to this blocking made me think that she must be angrier at me for reasons unknown to me. In some ways, I really wish I could turn back the clock and apologize to her for everything that went wrong even though it wasn’t totally my fault.

Now for the response on Facebook I received.

First I am going to call this female responder Janie as to protect her identity.

Janie and I had gone to high school together and really were never that close, however like many others from high school she friended me on Facebook about a year or so ago.

Janie usually spoke her mind and while sometimes mean-spirited, she was rarely ever offensive. That was until this most current posting, which did bother me somewhat.

While her remarks are only 5 lines long, they speak volumes on feelings that really should not exist at all. In one recent message to me, she stated that she “was not my enemy”. I will leave it up to you, dear readers to decide the fate of that statement.

So here we go:

Her first sentence is “I’m sorry to know how depressed you are”. I see nothing wrong with that statement at all.

Sentence 2 is “No one deserves to feel that way”. So far nothing wrong with that statement either.

Sentence 3 is “I’m sure you are a bad person.” Just as the train was rolling smoothly down the tracks we now have this huge derailment. Honestly, where does this sentence follow the first 2 especially when she said just a few weeks earlier that she was “not my enemy”? This sounds like a HUGE contradiction to me. What does she mean by a bad person? Maybe the next sentence might give us a clue.

Sentence 4 is “After just having read some of your last blogs, I think your view of the world is rather narrow.” Ok, you have read only SOME of my blogs and you think I am a bad person because of it? Of course, Janie doesn’t say which blogs she finds me narrow-minded on, therefore her theory falls flat with zero proof.

Sentence 5 is “Have you had a thorough medical check up?” Now unless Janie has a medical degree, this statement is way out of place and certainly uncalled for. However, let me set the record straight, mentally I am absolutely fine, physically walking and standing is an issue and has been since before I lost my job over 5 years ago. Beyond that nothing about my health should even be discussed.

Sentence 6 is “Are you (sic) parents aware of how you’re feeling?” Is she serious? I am well over 21 and this just goes beyond absurd. Again this statement holds no value as Janie doesn’t hold a medical degree so it is not her place to make type of diagnosis.

Finally, sentence 7 is “I believe there are ways to hear (sic) yourself so that you can feel better.” What does this even mean? It makes no sense whatsoever.

Overall, I was quite offended by Janie’s posting. However, I decided not to either unfriend or block her as I feel that would really be the wrong thing to do. I feel that I have a lot to say that would benefit her as would fellow readers. Unfortunately, none of the sentences that Janie stated followed any of the others. No proof of any problems were given, which presented a non-existent case on her behalf.

It is ironic that some of the same things that Janie brought up were some of the same conversations that I used to have with Tanya during her employment with me. However, in Tanya's case, she talked more of her own problems and how we had similar problems and how we could solve our problems together.

Yet, in the end, Tanya ended up blocking me from her existence and turned her back on me. Hopefully, Janie doesn’t end up the same way. I think she is smarter than that.

Walmart–Not Safe Anywhere

It has been a very bad week for Walmart.

First we had the tragic accident in New Jersey by a Walmart tractor trailer that critically injured comic Tracy Morgan and killed another passenger. It was reported that the truck driver hadn’t slept in about 24 hours, much longer than allowed by law. It has been reported that Walmart will stand behind the driver in any charges brought against him.

However, and this is a big however, the driver has gone on a Twitter rampage making outlandish statements that this was all blown out of proportion by the media and their cameras. One of the worst was that his profile said “Move or Get Hit #Walmart”. It seems to me that anybody who would ever write something like this should never be employed as a truck driver especially with a company like Walmart. My best advice for Walmart is for them to fire this guy once and for all and distance themselves from this criminal.

Meanwhile, a couple of days later on the west coast of Las Vegas, a couple shot 2 cops at a restaurant then went to the Walmart nearby where they shot a customer and then went to the back of the store and committed suicide after making a statement that this was the “start of the revolution”. Now while the authorities are trying to figure out, what this was all about, it brings up another concern about safety and Walmart, from a totally different perspective.

First let us take a look at the truck accident. Certainly, this could have happened with any company’s truck and any employee who fakes their logs to drive longer than legally allowed. However, being an employee of Walmart, the driver is the company. He must act in responsible manner at all times. Apparently, he either chose not to or just enjoys breaking the law anyway. Given his Twitter feed, I believe the latter is more of the answer.

What really bothers me about all this is that more and more trucks seem to be going much faster than the posted speed limits on the highways. Not only that but many of the companies no longer have the notice on the back of their trucks of “How’s My Driving? Call.”. Maybe they have had too many calls reporting too many bad drivers. I believe that there should be more of a crackdown on drivers and have more weigh stations open that would check driver’s logs and get these potentially dangerous drivers off the road.

Now as far as the store incident in Las Vegas is concerned, it is difficult to tell if this really could have been avoided. However, stores like Walmart really should have better security with people who are armed just in case such incidents like this occur. Of course, this would create a possible unsafe environment for everybody with the thought that someone is walking around a store who is armed even though they are protecting the store.

Unfortunately, I know of no store that has armed security people in them to protect the customers and other employees. Given the number of incidents in recent years, certainly the need for better security is a necessity. In future posts, I will discuss safety in much deeper detail and how bad it really is.

Overall, it is not known yet what kind of damage these 2 incidents will have on the Walmart name. Given the type of customer that Walmart attracts, I would not be surprised if they never notice the difference at all. However, to customers like me, it does give a bad impression of the company.

In the end, it may be time to bring back the commercials that Walmart had praising their employees and their company. They certainly need damage control now like never before the next tragic event happens.

Why Staples is Sliding in its Stocks

In my last post, I discussed the giving of huge bonuses to the top executives of Staples.

Since then, the stock has dropped to below $11/share, making it to one of the lowest points in the company’s history.

Five years ago, when I left the company, the stock was valued at over $21/share and now it is worth about half that much.

So what is really happening here?

Bad weather has been the excuse used most of the time as the reason for the company’s failure to make the company’s sales goals. Even with the closure of companies like Circuit City, Staples still can’t improve and continued to fall when they should be gaining ground.

I feel that the real reason for their ongoing problems can be broken down to a couple of different things.

The first is that most all the items that Staples sells can be purchased elsewhere sometimes at a considerably cheaper price. This is has been especially beneficial to companies like Walmart as it has been a one-stop for just about everything.

But even Walmart has been hurt by such things as dollar stores and smaller retailers. So companies like Walmart can’t be blamed totally for the decline of Staples despite them causing a major hit against them, although Staples uses them as an easy target for their own decline.

The other problem is with the store’s management.

Anybody who has ever shopped or worked at Staples knows that the management seems to change almost as much as the staff that it employs. The reason is that if a manager sucks, they are shown the door.

Unfortunately, no manager is safe with Staples. Whether it is the store manager or sales manager or another manager, the company is notorious for eliminating managers on a regular basis.

During my nearly 10 years at Woolworth, we had only 2 store managers and 1 interim manager. During my nearly 13 years at Staples, we had at least 5 store managers and countless sales managers.

This regular changeover of management never made Staples an enjoyable place to work as each manager brought in their own rules and policies, basically undoing the policies of the manager before them.

So are the managers that bad?

Not at all but Staples would rather fire managers and put someone new in rather than staying the course and having some consistency within the company.

Overall, I feel that Staples should stop swapping out managers so frequently and learn to accept managers’ flaws. However, Staples is either unable or unwilling to suck it up and accept their managers.

So this whole scenario creates the instability that is unloved by those on Wall Street, therefore the stock continues its downward slide.

In some ways, I am thankful that I am no longer with the company as they continue their own slow death.

Sometimes liars do benefit others.