Doomed To Repeat Them.

You know the old saying about people who don't learn from mistakes of the past.

Everywhere I've worked in retail, it's always the same. Corporate slashes payroll budgets in the first three fourths of the year, to cover for the final quarter. In doing so, however, they create conditions that drive their business away. Let me give retail executives a word of advice, if they want to keep their customers:

1. DO NOT cut payroll on the WEEKENDS.
2. DO NOT cut payroll on the WEEKENDS.
3. DO NOT CUT PAYROLL ON THE WEEKENDS!!

Weekends are the busiest time for general retailing, yet for reasons that just mystify me, companies do their worst budget cutting for that time frame. What happens is the remaining staff cannot adequately meet the needs of customers and handle the additional work load. Customers go away unhappy, and business is lost.

Of course, executives blame the clerks, saying they should work harder faster, but evidently they forgot their college economics classes. There's a concept called "Point of Diminishing Returns," meaning too much or too little of something is not necessarily a good thing. Cut payroll far enough and it becomes a PHYSICAL impossibility to complete the workload, no matter how hard the clerks try. Punishing them for corporate stupidity just diminishes morale, and then all the decent clerks who truly care for the customers leave for better employers.

What I would give to be able to get this through executive's heads! It's so simple, how can they not see it?