On The Shopping Front
Looking around at the preliminary reports, all the retailers did by annoying the hell out of their employees and opening on Thanksgiving was to steal sales from Black Friday. So they paid a lot of people to open a few extra hours and to open their stores for no real increase in sales, i.e. they increased their costs without improving their sales.
It is obscene what the people who make these kinds of stupid decisions are paid.
Update: The new spin is that there were more people shopping this year, but they didn’t spend as much money as last year.
Last year people were recovering from the effects of the devastation caused by Sandy on the Atlantic Coast. People and businesses are coming back from that, but most people don’t see their individual economic situation improving. The cut in food stamps at the beginning of the month certainly didn’t help people feel like they could afford to spend money on holiday gifts.
6 comments
Yep. They (Exec’s) should be paid .95c/hr. Which is still a lot more than they are worth, but I’m feeling generous today. So… what’s new about that? Most Exec’s I’ve worked with deserved to be paid less than the Janitor. At least the Janitor serves a very useful purpose. *shrug*
The most important man in any modern civilization is the garbage man, closely followed by the sewer and water department man. Those people go on strike, the city becomes an uninhabitable wasteland of filth and disease within days. Which means they earn $500,000 per year apiece, right? Yeah right :(.
Well, after our little wind storms the services that get funded the most quickly are debris removal and the water and sewer system. No one wants to pay for a special election to fill any vacant county commission seats because that isn’t an emergency.
Yes, it is obvious that people know what’s important, but they need an emergency to be willing to pay for it.
The average CEO could disappear and nobody would notice. They’re almost never in their office anyhow, they’re always hobnobbing with other CEO’s at “conferences” (claiming it’s networking to sell more stuff) or playing golf. In fact, HP has been trying that experiment for the past twenty years, during all of which they’ve never had a competent CEO yet they still sell more computers than any other company on the planet thanks to competent line managers who manage to get things done despite lack of that “strategic vision” that CEO’s claim is their reason for existence. I’m not sure what value that HP has gotten out of the assortment of mediocrities and scam artists who’ve been their CEO’s for the past twenty years, but somehow I suspect it’s closer to Kryten’s .95c/hour than to the millions of dollars they actually sucked in.
The only CEO’s I’ve seen who are worth a damn are the ones who founded the company, people like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, and of course Hewlett and Packard back in their day. They’re the people who had enough on the ball to steer the company to success in the first place and know where the bodies are hidden, so to speak. The rest of’em? Bah, humbug!
Oops, iCarly became CEO in 1999, so it’s a 14 year experiment in basically being CEO-less at HP, not a 20 year experiment. Still… :).
Most CEOs don’t know much if anything about what the corporation actually does, or the products that it sells. The founders know and understand their products, so they can make rational decisions based on that knowledge. When the corporation hires a ‘professional’ CEO they are getting someone who talks to those in their class and Wall Street analysts, not the people who make the products.
The Packard family repeatedly complained about what was going on at HP, but they were ignored as ‘outsiders’.
CEOs as a class think the only important product corporations have is their stock. They tend to tailor decisions to the stock market, rather than the market they sell to, and it shows.