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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

Not only are they ordered to do it but corporate puts requirements on the store as to how many joins they are expected to get each day, and cashiers have their own individual quotas and they get chewed out if they don’t meet them by managers who get chewed out for not meeting them. The fact that this behavior reduces sales throughput, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction are not worked into the analysis that comes up with these programs or their growth targets. Upper management comes up with a target and they push their stores to meet it, because their CMO went to a conference where he was wined and dined by the company that sells the software to run the loyalty card system and believes their stats about how it saved company X and now that they’ve spent the money the ROI has to meet internal targets or risk embarrassing the CMO.

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If you're lucky you just get chewed out. My wife used to work retail and in one store, you had to push credit cards, often to people who really should not have another one. If you failed to meet your quota you get a warning the first time and then fired the second time.

Setting goals for one person based on what another person chooses to do seems like a phenomenally stupid idea.

Welcome to sales and retail! Watch Glengarry Glen Ross.

This sounds heartbreakingly true, especially the part about the CMO being sold a fantasy at a conference. I really like the way you've chained it together from the C-suite all the way down to the lowly cashier.

Sounds like a company that would keep such an executive on board deserves to fail.

The failure of brick and mortar book stores is a net negative to society. Deserves to fail, maybe, but it'll suck when they do.

Unlike the Internet, when a break-and-mortar fails it's not easy for a competitor to break into the space and scoop up their market share. In theory in an efficient market, players that deserve to fail will be replaced and the market as a whole will remain and become stronger. In meatspace, where many things have friction, players that deserve to fail will bring the market down. I also wish it weren't the case, but it's not a market many players are actively trying to enter right now.

> Unlike the Internet, when a break-and-mortar fails it's not easy for a competitor to break into the space and scoop up their market share.

Also, in this space, there's a competitor that's on it's way to a monopoly. if B&N goes belly-up, I'm not even sure where I could buy books besides Amazon.

My situation might be different because I live in a major US city, but I can think of a handful of independent bookstores near where I live. If they didn't have what I was looking for they could probably order it for me.

Try powells.com, an independent but pretty comprehensive bookstore in Portland.

So many good memories as a kid of going to the local B&N with my parents. Unlike our library, it had coffee and social energy and tables set up for browsing and was open past 5pm.

It shared a cursed strip mall with a Blockbuster, a LAN gaming center, and a music shop that was finally torn down last year.

Blaming the executive here makes sense. But saying the "company deserves to fail" ignores the livelihoods of everyone below that person in the hierarchy, who gets fired because mgmt has different incentives than the workers.

Perhaps if those lower in the hierarchy and society as a whole are constantly burned by businesses failing due to incompetent leadership, they might start to expect or demand something different. Socialism? Anarchy? Some kind of socially conscious capitalism? I don't know what form it will take, but it might be something different than what we have now.

Isn't "conscious capitalism" what's being sold to us since the 70's, through the "new spirit of capitalism" ?

Anyways props to ur comment hah

Not to mention the fact that so many companies right now have new leadership that didn't build the company and are stuck, like B&N's here, not in a mode to improve the company but a mode to make sure there's as much meat for picking as possible when it eventually goes down in flames.

It seems like the "Old Business" world is just a nest of snakes eating each other until there's just one left to die of starvation.

Then how would the feedback loop be completed to provide information about which strategies are good and bad?

That's assuming that someone recognizes which strategy was responsible for failure. Blaming the competitors, or the employees, is probably much more comforting and easier for upper management.

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