CSotD: Firing Lines
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Retail has been playing in the rumor mill this week, with dubious predictions of store closings and Marla wondering if those rumors are true and, if so, might her store be on the hit list.
While actually closing the place down is, perhaps, specific to the retail industry, the overall concept of cutbacks and layoffs is familiar in these days of disembodied management making decisions that have nothing to do with local conditions.
I've wondered what would happen if a newspaper management team took over, say, Home Depot. They would notice that the store in St. Paul had sold X-number of snowblowers last month and would put out a chain-wide memo demanding that everyone match that total, and then would begin firing managers in Florida and Hawaii for not meeting quota.
And if they took over McDonalds, they would decide that food should be sold in the restaurant but given out free at the drive-thru. Then they would begin firing managers if their inside sales figures declined.
Today's open-browser gag reminded me of a morning in 2002 when I walked through the newsroom and saw one reporter's screen open to Lee Enterprises, which at the time was a 22-small-paper chain based primarily in the Missouri Valley. Having been in the job market just two years earlier, I was familiar with Lee but also appalled that he would reveal his job searching so carelessly.
Turned out he was looked up Lee because our little 16-paper chain had been acquired by them. But 38 newspapers of roughly the same small size was still manageable, though I was sorry to go from privately-held to publicly-traded ownership.
But then, three years later, Lee acquired the Pulitzer chain, including the 450,000 daily St. Louis Dispatch which every sane person assumed they would spin off (A) in order to recoup some of the choking debt that ensued, and (B) because the massive daily was way out of their area of expertise.
They did neither, nor did they even have the sense to realize that, ungainly as conference calls had been with 38 papers, to continue to try to schedule them in a chain of 58 was, well, a warning about what else the stable geniuses in Davenport, Iowa, had planned.
When I first began purchasing stock through their employee plan, the shares were worth about $40 each. Shortly after I left in 2006, they dropped to $4 and they only went down from there. They are currently worth $2.40 each and I've seen them at less than half that.
Like Cooper, I have a strongly heightened sense of schadenfreude for disembodied corporate overlords, and so was particularly delighted that, when I dissolved my 401k, the timing was such that, after they gave me all my money but apparently before they closed the account, there was a distribution and so technically I still own a fraction of a single share.
This means that, over the past decade-plus, they have had to keep sending me proxies and Chapter 11 notices and other things, the postage each time costing them about three times the value of my holdings.
Keep hoping, Coop. Time wounds all heels.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the briny, Alex has been updating new compliance rules in British markets, making the strip a little obscure for American readers. However, the current arc about robotic management is universal and fits my memories of corporate life.
As much as people may joke about "being awarded the cardboard box," it's a humiliating event, particularly when it comes out of the blue.
The ideal situation is to jump before you get pushed, but I had a friend at the NY Daily News who was called into a meeting and was not even awarded the box — while she was being told the bad news, her phone number and email were being canceled and security marched her straight from the boss's office to the sidewalk.
She had to have friends gather her personal effects later.
The punchline being that she was only dismissed in a financial cutback, not for poor performance.
I guess it's funnier in a cartoon strip.
And if you think freelancing would spare you all this, the Oatmeal points out the fact that you still have to deal with clients and collaborators.
There are warning signs, of course, and you can decline a project if you pick up on the vibe in time.
Unless you want to pay your rent or perhaps purchase some groceries.
My first major freelance job managed to combine idiocy with mendacity, and I had to go to court to get paid, which meant figuring out the cost of suing versus the cost of giving in.
I was willing to go full Winston on that.
Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
The avoidance of which is why you get half the money up front.
And why you try to bargain such that "half the money" is at least two-thirds of what you'd have done the whole thing for anyway.
Three minds with but a single thought:
The Banishment of Bannon struck several cartoonists as worthy of comment, and inspired this unfortunate three-way head-on.
I'm amused by Juxtapositions, when two cartoonists pick up on a similar theme, but this coincidence I point out because it illustrates a point: There's very little plagiarism in the business, but sometimes more than one person has the same idea.
Granted, it's not the most breakthrough concept: Panhandlers with signs are a standard cartooning image.
But here are three top-flight cartoonists and three well-drawn cartoons that appeared simultaneously.
If you open your window, you can hear the sound of three heads banging on drawing boards.
Shit happens, guys. Tomorrow's another day.
Sometimes the originality is in the delivery
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