Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData

Exploring How Customers Interact With Advertising, Products, Brands, and Channels, using Multichannel Forensics.

December 16, 2008

Best Buy Voluntary Separation

This is a ten page transcript of the Best Buy investor conference call.

The company announced that it is offering voluntary separation to 4,000 salaried employees, nearly every salaried individual. The company says it may not get enough volunteers, requiring involuntary separation. The company also makes the brazen statement (multiple times) that it is "employee-centric", in the midst of communicating the need to fire employees.

And from page three to page ten, the investment community are given the chance to ask any question they wish.

They ask about capex, about inventory management, about gift cards, Rewards Zone, Geek Squad, vendors, gross margins. They ask multiple questions about Circuit City, for goodness sake.

They do not ask one single question about employees, about voluntary separation, or about involuntary separation. And you'd think they would care about how much money would be saved, wouldn't you?

Our system of business harvests people, uses people, exploits people, manipulates people, over-works people, under-pays people, scams people, and demands revenue from people. The system praises those who shed "headcount", then grumbles when "headcount" has no money to spend to fuel capitalism.

Our system of business does not care about people
. If it did, would we be knee-deep in The Great Implosion?

1 Comments:

At 6:17 AM , Blogger Bryce Carmony said...

unfortunately capitalism is burdened with a little thing we call Government, which when first created was limited to insure individual rights to property and giving the infrastructure for us to grow and prosper, now Government has grown into an unchecked cancer with a monopoly on guns to use force to get what it wants. it's easy to criticize capitalism but at least best buy does something I want for my money unlike uncle sam who just takes my money to reward bad business decisions, maybe Best Buy deserves a bailout, why not throw 30 million their way and have the hard working tax payer foot the bill? you want to see exploitation, look at the percentage of the national product that ends up in the control of government. we are in a recession because we over regulate everything, which removes responsibility and ergo creates irresponsible adults and consumers, who in turn file frivolous lawsuits which stifles innovation and increases the cost of doing business, then we tax the eye balls out of everyone so people have less and less buying power. Capitalism is not the problem my friend, its government, the big , cancerous , horrible, soon to be worse, blight on our society. Limited government was what our founding fathers fought for and we threw that away.

 

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