Associate
- Joined
- 24 Feb 2004
- Posts
- 1,083
- Location
- Leeds/Cyprus
Why does Carphone Warehouse need 3 outlets in Leeds City Centre, each of them 1 street away from the other? And why are there 3 Orange shops within 30" walk from each other? I can understand if a company gets hold of a store in a more prominent location than their other stores they'd want to rent it as soon as possible, but why not close down one of their other outlets and move the staff over to the new one? I've never seen any of those stores anywhere near full, so my guess is that their main function is to act like a walk-in billboards that each cost a bucketful of £50s in rent, probably close to £100k in staff salaries, and a lot of prime real-estate that could've been put to better use by a company with something more interesting to sell.
It's not just mobile phone retailers either, although it does seem to be particularly virulent with them, since each of the other major operators also has more than one store in close proximity to each other (at least in most places that I've been to in the UK). But what's doing my head in is that at the end of every year every major retailer in the country reports lower profits than they'd predicted and all the analysts forecast doom and gloom for the high street as online and mail/phone-order businesses eat away at their customer base like a cancer. Does it never occur to these people that their own incompetence is what's running them into the mire? Though of course it's not incompetence, it's the plague of disinterest that pervades corporate culture today, with everyone so dissociated from the day-to-day running of the companies they work for, so lacking in company loyalty and so unconcerned about helping the customer that their careers consist solely of concoting numbers that illustrate how well they are performing to their equally-disinterested superiors. No store manager in an Orange shop would point out the idiocy of running a store 1 street away from another Orange shop for fear that it's HIS store that'll end up being shut down if anyone listens; though of course no area manager would close down any of his stores as long as they're making a sliver-thin margin of profit, because having more stores in his area makes him seem more important to corporate HQ, and saves his area from being subordinated into some other area manager's jurisdiction; and no corporate executive will ever bother to go down into the streets to see how ridiculously close to each other his stores are and how his subordinates have been pulling the wool over his eyes in order to cover their behinds, so they'll never know how much they could've increased their profit margins by reducing the overheads of operating multiple stores. At least, not until the whole company's in financial trouble and someone discovers this idiocy and takes them to task for it, at which point they can raise their hands high and say "not my fault! my subordinates have failed me!"
Of course I don't have a solution to all this, the only purpose of this post was to rant. Discuss or ignore as you like.
It's not just mobile phone retailers either, although it does seem to be particularly virulent with them, since each of the other major operators also has more than one store in close proximity to each other (at least in most places that I've been to in the UK). But what's doing my head in is that at the end of every year every major retailer in the country reports lower profits than they'd predicted and all the analysts forecast doom and gloom for the high street as online and mail/phone-order businesses eat away at their customer base like a cancer. Does it never occur to these people that their own incompetence is what's running them into the mire? Though of course it's not incompetence, it's the plague of disinterest that pervades corporate culture today, with everyone so dissociated from the day-to-day running of the companies they work for, so lacking in company loyalty and so unconcerned about helping the customer that their careers consist solely of concoting numbers that illustrate how well they are performing to their equally-disinterested superiors. No store manager in an Orange shop would point out the idiocy of running a store 1 street away from another Orange shop for fear that it's HIS store that'll end up being shut down if anyone listens; though of course no area manager would close down any of his stores as long as they're making a sliver-thin margin of profit, because having more stores in his area makes him seem more important to corporate HQ, and saves his area from being subordinated into some other area manager's jurisdiction; and no corporate executive will ever bother to go down into the streets to see how ridiculously close to each other his stores are and how his subordinates have been pulling the wool over his eyes in order to cover their behinds, so they'll never know how much they could've increased their profit margins by reducing the overheads of operating multiple stores. At least, not until the whole company's in financial trouble and someone discovers this idiocy and takes them to task for it, at which point they can raise their hands high and say "not my fault! my subordinates have failed me!"
Of course I don't have a solution to all this, the only purpose of this post was to rant. Discuss or ignore as you like.
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