Here's what I know. They've sent all the Americans home---with no guarantee of positions elsewhere in the company, just an option of applying if any are available (Ha!). They made a clean sweep of the Regional office, making most of the positions redundant and letting a lot of good people go (of course they manage to keep the most useless ones typically). Shelves in a lot of the stores are semi-bare and customer service has gone to crap. Most of the stores have never been profitable anyway. I can't imagine they can go much longer. Anyone have any info?
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@ HmYzvQl-1rhi, that's a very interesting synopsis. So it sounds like they ( Mackey and Robb) are just STILL flying, but not really coming up with any viable plan. They trusted DL, ( who nobody liked when he was in NorCal anyway - we still have the DL boxes for show in produce here) but DL couldn't run the NA let alone England.
So not surprising, so what are they actually doing? Playing grocery store?
I'm in leadership in the UK region so know exactly what's been going on.
The region opened in 2007 and was originally part of the NA region which David Lannon was the president of and he got things wrong straight off the bat. The first store he opened was High Street Kensington located in a huge 80,000sq feet building (2nd largest in the company) that used to a department store, that store lost around £1million ($1.6million USD) a period and didn't become profitable until about a 1 year ago but that wasn't the problem. The call was made that if the UK region was going to work it couldn't run out of the NA regional office in Boston and needed to become its own region with its own president. Step forward the now 365 President Jeff Turnas who really f---ed things up!. The first mistake he made was he brought over a bunch of Americans without realising that the UK and the US are completely different and bring in people to try and run it like for like would never work. In the process, he expanded the regional team from nobody to a team with more coordinators that some US regions for example the regional grocery team had 1 coordinator, 2 Assoc. coordinators, 1 regional buyer, 1 planogrammer and 1 purchasing assistant all for a region with 9 stores!. So after year after year of losses Jeff had his asshanded to him by A.C. and Ken Meyers and was told to make cuts which he did by coming up with what is now the 365 model of having two coordinators overseeing purchasing for the 8 teams and each team having 1 regional buyer and 1 purchasing gutting the whole regional staff by half.
The second mistake was they opened two stores outside of London which are the least profitable stores in the whole company, about a month ago they announced cuts in those two stores with all the TL's and ATL's going and there being 1 perishable team leader and 1 non-perishable, at the same time they gutted all instore marketing TL's and created 4 regional positons which the 8 redundant TL's had to fight for.
The regional is now profitable and sales from the High street Kensington store and Piccadilly Circus store are now so good they can be compared to some of the profitable US stores but moral is at an all-time low with no one thinking that the region will last long.
The small store 365 model wouldn't work in the UK as that's already how we operate, with the exception of Kensington all of our store are 28,000sqft or less.
So the beatnick that just left the UK after doing all the damage- and is being lauded for turning it around- is the prez of the 365 stores- so they may not find as much success as they had hoped- the whole company is being run on ego and all the aspects of WFM that made it different from other retailers are going away thanks to DL and the other idiot. basically it will end up being a non-union shoprite with nicer finishes
Sounds like the rest of the regions here in the States as well. You described my store anyway...and positions have disappeared. Hiring just part time too...and that is NOT working out. We've lost every PT person we've hired in just one year's time save one.
So likely the UK is going through what we are too....just read prior posts on here to get a better idea. Things are so bad many of us wonder if they might start shutting down stores, but it's not that easy. Contracts and leases would bring about numerous fines of great proportion. I think we'll see more 365 stores here and fewer if any WFMs being built. Does the UK know about the 365 concept? Google it...that's the model for what things will be looking like for all of us eventually.