Once upon a time, perhaps up to a decade ago, Walmart was a winner. You could feel something amongst its employees. But how would you ever have proved it was real instead of subjective and impressionistic? But I was convinced of an elan vital amongst all those low-wage employees in that giant corporation. But in the middle Aughts, it seemed that spirit started draining out of Walmart.
Today I went to Walmart for a routine oil and lube job. There were no long lines, which was a pleasant surprise. Or was it? The first thing they started doing was fumbling with those handheld gadgets that supposedly "manage information" about your rig: real rocket science stuff, like your name, address, and odometer reading. I've yet to see one of their employees use these gadgets without struggle and delay. No doubt these handheld gadgets were sold as "productivity enhancers" by some executive in the I.T. (information technology) department, back at corporate headquarters.
The next thing they told me was that my tires were worn on one side and they weren't willing to rotate them. Furthermore 'I was to blame,' and so the tire company wouldn't cough up some money for not living up to the guaranteed mileage. That argument was perhaps correct for two out of the four tires in question. In any case, it was asserted so quickly and aggressively that I became suspicious.
Inside the store I was asked to sign too many legal disclaimers, avowing that I had been warned by Walmart that I needed a couple new tires.
(I had a flashback at what happened when I bought these lousy tires at Walmart a couple years ago. The employees seemed like real losers. When I got home I popped off the hubcaps and found that 2 nuts out of 8 had not been tightened.)
Hmm, what should I do? It had been years since I bought tires at one of Walmart's competitors. I drove over to Big O Tires. They showed a completely different attitude. The employee who grabbed me at the door did everything: helped me select a tire, gave me a sale price, helped me park in a rather crowded parking lot, and did the installation without making me unhitch the trailer! You know, air-wrenches and floor jacks! He even finished up with the typical computerized cash register fumble, without handing it off to another employee.
I was amazed that one employee "owned" me through the entire process. Typically the customer talks to a "customer's man" at the front desk. The guy typically know little about anything automotive or mechanical, but he dresses in cleaner clothes, speaks college-boy English, and is a little more personable. (Or thinks he is.)
The customer might have a pertinent piece of information: the symptom occurs after X, but not Y. Do you think any of that is going to be passed to the guy who actually repairs your car? I once had a repair job become a nightmare because of a poor information-hand-off like this.
The employee at the Big O Tire then helped me learn about a possible upgrade to my trailer tires. Once again, he immediately jumped in with a can-do spirit, infused with experience and skill.
So how would you analyze this company? Would you really learn anything by looking at a financial spreadsheet, subtracting column C from B, and then dividing by column R, ad infinitum? Even if you came up with the perfect formula, have you really explained anything? Can it predict anything? It seems to me that spreadsheet arithmetic merely confirms the Effect, without elucidating the Cause.
We live in an age when something must be scientific to be intellectually respectable. And to look scientific, it must be mathematical, or at least, numerical, countable, measurable. But what if the Cause of a company's success is about cultural values in the corporation? How do you measure or quantify those?
Today I went to Walmart for a routine oil and lube job. There were no long lines, which was a pleasant surprise. Or was it? The first thing they started doing was fumbling with those handheld gadgets that supposedly "manage information" about your rig: real rocket science stuff, like your name, address, and odometer reading. I've yet to see one of their employees use these gadgets without struggle and delay. No doubt these handheld gadgets were sold as "productivity enhancers" by some executive in the I.T. (information technology) department, back at corporate headquarters.
The next thing they told me was that my tires were worn on one side and they weren't willing to rotate them. Furthermore 'I was to blame,' and so the tire company wouldn't cough up some money for not living up to the guaranteed mileage. That argument was perhaps correct for two out of the four tires in question. In any case, it was asserted so quickly and aggressively that I became suspicious.
Inside the store I was asked to sign too many legal disclaimers, avowing that I had been warned by Walmart that I needed a couple new tires.
(I had a flashback at what happened when I bought these lousy tires at Walmart a couple years ago. The employees seemed like real losers. When I got home I popped off the hubcaps and found that 2 nuts out of 8 had not been tightened.)
Hmm, what should I do? It had been years since I bought tires at one of Walmart's competitors. I drove over to Big O Tires. They showed a completely different attitude. The employee who grabbed me at the door did everything: helped me select a tire, gave me a sale price, helped me park in a rather crowded parking lot, and did the installation without making me unhitch the trailer! You know, air-wrenches and floor jacks! He even finished up with the typical computerized cash register fumble, without handing it off to another employee.
I was amazed that one employee "owned" me through the entire process. Typically the customer talks to a "customer's man" at the front desk. The guy typically know little about anything automotive or mechanical, but he dresses in cleaner clothes, speaks college-boy English, and is a little more personable. (Or thinks he is.)
The customer might have a pertinent piece of information: the symptom occurs after X, but not Y. Do you think any of that is going to be passed to the guy who actually repairs your car? I once had a repair job become a nightmare because of a poor information-hand-off like this.
The employee at the Big O Tire then helped me learn about a possible upgrade to my trailer tires. Once again, he immediately jumped in with a can-do spirit, infused with experience and skill.
So how would you analyze this company? Would you really learn anything by looking at a financial spreadsheet, subtracting column C from B, and then dividing by column R, ad infinitum? Even if you came up with the perfect formula, have you really explained anything? Can it predict anything? It seems to me that spreadsheet arithmetic merely confirms the Effect, without elucidating the Cause.
We live in an age when something must be scientific to be intellectually respectable. And to look scientific, it must be mathematical, or at least, numerical, countable, measurable. But what if the Cause of a company's success is about cultural values in the corporation? How do you measure or quantify those?
Comments
PS - We've had some bad experiences with Big O (in Yuma and Napa) and will probably try Les Schwab next.
Yes I might have made a mistake in generalizing my experience at the Richfield UT Big O Tire into an undeserved corporate-wide praise. Time will tell.
Perhaps my positive experience at the Richfield UT store implies that it was independently owned.
When corporations have a mixture of independently-owned and corporate-owned, it sure would be nice for travelers if some "app" told us which was which. Then we could adjust our purchases accordingly.
What you said about Costco might be true for all I know. I never saw many employees there except at the check-out lines, where they usually had too few of them.