Article:
https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/4665130002
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That story is at the first page of Google today.
I don't know if people remember my writing about working at Macy's in Boston for the 2017-2018 holiday season.
I was shocked when I started working there. The registers and phones are decades old. The fixtures are dangerously broken, so that they could and did slide off counters and displays, and there's nobody to fix or replace them. The phone number for visual displays didn't work at all. The keys and locks frequently didn't work. The mechanism for taking anti-theft tags off merchandise at the sales counter frequently didn't work. There wasn't adequate storage space for the products, and a lot of things were damaged before they were even on the sales floor. The decor in the store was decades old. The locker room for employees and the lockers in it were decades old.
There was nobody assigned to keeping track of clothes that customers brought into the dressing rooms. There was just a sign informing customers that the dressing rooms were monitored by same-sex personnel, meaning that people were watching them change in the dressing rooms.
When I was hired, one of the orientation videos that I had to watch depicted the union as a diabolical organization that takes away employees' right to speak their minds to their employers.
Customers often had coupons that were supposed to take a percentage off their purchases. About half of every coupon was fine print about all of the merchandise to which the coupon couldn't be applied.
I said at the time that Macy's was going to go out of business. The store did nothing to be competitive. It didn't give its employees the tools that they needed to provide fast, professional customer service. It didn't give its employees a nice place to put their coats and boots. It didn't have task lists for employees for cleaning and maintaing their work stations. Far from soliciting employee feedback, it actively discouraged those conversations. It pretended to be generous toward customers when it was stingy in the most tedious way possible. It didn't invest in providing a beautiful shopping environment.
Despite all of that, I had fun. My coworkers and most of the customers were nice people. I'm glad that I was able to work at this American institution before it entirely imploded from the myopia, greed, selfishness and antiquated business practices that seem to be destroying a lot of retail establishments. For the months that I worked there, people were still visiting from all over the world. Many of them were also shocked by the discrepancy between Macy's reputation and the reality. Years of stupidity at the corporate level have thrown the business away. Something like Macy's doesn't die overnight; it takes decades of cutting corners to ruin the results of decades of other people's hard work.
