Why I quit my life in retail and bought magic beans instead (part 2)

"Are you a betting man, Jason?"

I'm not, and I told him so. But that didn't matter to my District Manager. He was on a roll, and he wasn't going to stop until he'd had his fun.

"How much would you bet that I can't find a wrong price on merchandise in your store?"

"I wouldn't take that bet," I tried again to demur. He was having none of it.

"But if you were to bet... how much would it be? Would you bet your job on it?"

That wouldn't be my first choice in wagers. But I guess that's kind of the point, isn't it?

Just to set the scene, this is from my time at Petsmart. The guy playing the role of my District Manager... let's just call him Bill, because that's his name...is a distinctive looking guy. Think Alfred E. Neuman, the cartoon face of Mad Magazine, but put on some glasses, add some weight, and put it all on the body of an aged football player. Here's my artist's rendition (okay, it's not much more than the real Alfred with a bit of distortion and some superimposed glasses, but it'll have to do...):

Of course, upon walking through the store, Bill did find a wrong price (or two, if I remember correctly). That's what these kinds of visits are for, and I'm convinced that the prime qualifications of the job of district manager are:

A) The desire to catch mistakes which will make store managers look a bit foolish

and

B) The uncanny ability to act on that desire

He didn't fire me. I'm not sure what he would have done if I were foolish enough to take his bet. Later in the same visit (he was frisky that day) he threatened my job from another direction. It seemed rehearsed, so I'm sure he'd used it on other managers, but I have to give him full credit for his beautifully deadpan delivery.

"Now Jason," he began slowly, "let's say we were to walk fifty feet straight out the front doors of the store."

I nodded politely to move the skewering along.

"and let's say we were to turn around, and look at the store..."

"Okay?"

"Now there would be a sign above the door, wouldn't there?"

"Yes."

"Refresh my memory... do you suppose the sign would read 'JASONsmart' or do you think it would read 'PETsmart'?"

"It would read 'PETsmart.'"

"Well how 'bout that?" he drawled a bit for emphasis. "If it did read JASONsmart, I guess you could run the store any old way you wanted, couldn't you? But since it's still PETsmart on the sign, how about we do it the way the company wants you to?"

I wasn't arguing, mind you. I was just being a straight-man for Bill's skit. But just in case I wasn't taking him seriously enough, he threw down one more zinger:

"By the way, Jason... how much do you suppose they're paying on unemployment benefits these days?"

Bill didn't dislike me. I'd be surprised now if he even remembered me. Bill was about a year away from retirement, and he'd had three Canadian stores tacked onto the northern edge of his Washington state district just out of convenience. He might have been vaguely annoyed by having to travel across the border more frequently, but my store was turning a better than expected profit, so he was happy to take a little extra bonus. He gave me a good performance review the following year, and then handed me off to an absolutely awful new Canadian district manager.

The new DM... let's just call him Daren, because that's his name... did much the same thing on his visits, except he wasn't as funny, and was a lot more mean-spirited. I can usually find something nice to say about just about anyone, but I'm really struggling here. If any of my old friends from Petsmart are reading this, maybe you could help me out. Hmmm... something redeeming about Daren...

...

Oh yeah... he once told me that he keeps a pretty nicely landscaped yard. Anyone who likes to garden can't be all bad. Oh, and he had two sons who he sometimes spoke fondly about.

But other than that, he was just an ugly, frightened little man, who did his best to manage through intimidation, which was the trend in the field management of the company at the time.

Where am I going with this? Forgive me while I digress a bit.

I wrote before, in another post, that retail could be an incredibly superficial business. At least that's been my experience. Some organizations are better than others, but there's just something structural that lends itself to this outcome:

• Most retail organizations try hard not to own anything. Their largest financial outlay is for inventory. It's bought on credit, and the whole goal of the buyer is to sell the inventory quickly, preferably before it's even paid for.
• The retail space is rented, and dressed up to suit the colors and logos of the company. The people are rented too (in a way). The staff, in general, is easily hired, and turnover is high. Investments in training are weighed against the reality that many of the staff are quite temporary anyhow.
• The retailer doesn't "make" or "grow" much of anything. If merchandise has the retailer's brand on it, it's most likely that they've paid a third party to manufacture it to specifications, and just slap a label on it. The product is only superficially connected to the retailer.
• Being a highly leveraged business, there's an emphasis on quick results. A few bad quarters is all it takes to topple a seemingly stable retailer. Even one bad quarter is enough to make the share value of publicly traded retailers drop to the floor. Which is bad for executive bonuses, which makes field management very cranky, and which makes life as a store level manager very difficult.

Now, about the only things that retailers do own outright are their "brand" and their "culture".

On the point of "Brand", I've never met a marketing person who didn't worship at the alter of "Brand". And I guess they have a point. Of the following two brands, which do you think has the image of better quality?

 or...

The analogy isn't quite apt, though. Both Ford and Apple have actually built something, and therefore the reputation for quality (or lack of it) is sort of earned. In retail, nothing is built. It's just a rented building, with rented staff, with borrowed merchandise which is, by the way, pretty similar in every way to what's being offered in any other retail outlet.

So how do the marketing guys build a "brand" (and therefore justify their existence) in retail? Well, they choose the colors on the walls, the fonts on the signage, the style and material of the shirts that the employees wear... and, of course, they advertise. If they're successful in their efforts, they create the right sentiment in customers when they see the "brand". It's all quite warm and fuzzy, really.

Despite the fact that much of this effort is conspicuously superficial, the trick is to have the customer "believe" in it. Or at least be willing to suspend disbelief. That's where "culture" comes in. And if you thought that developing a brand was a tough go, developing a culture makes it look like a cakewalk. The reason it's so important really comes down to the believability factor. It doesn't matter how well the marketing people write a slogan, or choose the proper floor tiles, or whatever else they've done, if the customer isn't, on some level, convinced by the front line staff and management that this is "real".

And in order for the staff to sell the experience to the public, the company first needs to sell the experience to the staff. They hope that this employee "culture" lends some of its reality to the brand.

I've been a true believer.

Or I've tried to be... many times, in several different retail organizations.

I remember the first time I experienced a "culture" event in retail. The retailer was Consumers Distributing. Ah, now that takes you back in time, doesn't it. Such a quaint idea. A laminated catalog. Tiny little pencils. Order desk. Pickup desk. And, oh yeah, the inevitable "Sorry, we don't have that item in stock right now".

The leadership at Consumers Distributing decided they company needed a "rebranding", and to support that, they decided to sell the staff on a new "culture". We had a big meeting. There were balloons. A new mascot was introduced. We were "OBsessed with customer service", and Oby (a mascot that looked suspiciously like a big blue ball with a drawn-on face) would lead the way!

Oby wouldn't be the last silly mascot I met in retail, nor was OBsessed my last culture event.

Consumers Distributing didn't much change the way it did business. There was a marketing campaign to try to convince customers that we really did have things in stock. We didn't. Funny how customers saw through right through that.

Another neat tactic in shaping a culture is to rename things. Dumb as that sounds, some marketing and HR people really think that renaming things will change a whole corporate culture. Here's an example:

When I first joined Petsmart, there was an initiative underway to cut labour costs. Understandable, considering their financial performance at the time. But it wouldn't do to actually call it what it was. The company went through all sorts of efforts to "brand" the cost cutting.

We're Petsmart. Pet. Smart.

We're smart. As in efficient. Everything we do, we'll do it smart.

Our new budgeting "tool": WorkSmart.

Okay, now I don't much care if they call it "Ernie". It was a reduction in hours. As much as they tried to dress it up by unveiling details about their rigorous methods to develop the budget, the hourly staff knew they were losing hours. People are pretty smart that way, pardon the pun. I have no problem with cost-cutting... but call it what it is.

A couple of years later, during another culture adjustment, it was decided that our focus should not be "work" but rather it should be the "customer". Heck, I was half expecting my old friend Oby to jump out from behind the curtain.

It was, alas, another renaming exercise. Amongst other changes, WorkSmart became CustomerSmart. Huh?

Okay, again... it's just a name. I could read the report the same way, no matter what they called it. It just puzzled me a bit that someone thought this renaming exercise was worth doing.

Another year or so later, Petsmart decided to rename its customers. "Customer" was too generic. It didn't imply a relationship. Now, our customers were to be referred to in all communications as "Pet Parents". So now what with the labour report, "PetParentSmart"? Whah-tev-er.

But Petsmart wasn't done yet. In my final Arizona conference for Store Directors (that was their language for "Managers") the President unveiled the ultimate renaming exercise: to great fanfare, he announced that Petsmart would now become PetSmart.

Did you catch that? There's a new capital letter in there. Honest, it makes a big difference. No longer would there be any nagging ambiguity over whether we were a mart for pets. No, we were unquestionably smart about pets. 

This would be unveiled with an ad campaign. Hundreds of stores would have new signage installed. It was to be the greatest single moment in the history of pet retail. But first, we were given the mission of going back to our stores and sharing the good news.

We, the Store Directors, had been asked to do this before. The previous two conferences had been devoted to sending home a "culture of fun", and a "culture of people" (people are the HEART of our business, they had earnestly vowed, handing us little LED lit plastic beating hearts to demonstrate their commitment).

Back in the real world, nothing had changed. This sort of gets us back to the top of the posting, with Bill snidely instilling fear into the store-level managers. He was followed by an even more vicious little man (Daren) who was, I'm told, completely eviscerated in a floor walk with the incoming Regional Manager. He proceeded to up the ante by publicly bullying and ridiculing those managers who he had a hand in firing. This is right around the time where I went to find a new job. Still retail, but nowhere near as ugly a scene.

But so much for people being the "heart of the business", eh? So much for a culture of fun.

That's the problem with rebranding, and with culture building exercises. Both are often code for slapping on a new coat of paint, and then doing business the same old way. This is particularly true because the core of operations level managers (District and Regional Managers) are recruited from elsewhere in retail. They've seen all this before at Zellers, or Canadian Tire, or wherever else they started their careers. What they know for certain is that they can get strong financial results from leaning heavily on the store management team. They also know that whatever cultural initiative comes down from marketing or HR, it's likely to fade away over the course of the next year. Perhaps even by the next quarterly financial results conference call.

That's what did me in, in the end. It's probably just me, but after twenty years of it, I was beginning to feel a bit dishonest about it. Every time I saw them break out the balloons, I began to dread the upcoming job of selling a new initiative or culture to my staff. 

An amusing side-note: after the last blog posting I wrote on retail, I got into a conversation with my cousin Greg, who is a manager in the grocery business. One day, while doing a floor walk with a field manager, he was told (with a straight face, mind you) "Greg, never underestimate the power of balloons!"

I couldn't have said it better myself.