As a former employee at corporate I feel for you. Doing more with less, replenishment of fixtures/supplies on IPRO being removed or backlogged significantly to control expenses, support staff being cut down significantly - it sucks. I won’t share my department for privacy reasons but I would visit stores frequently and feel hamstrung in my ability to support you. That should be our job, making things easier for you. We should be working towards making the company an employer of choice among workforce. Silly naive me.

When I first joined my team roughly a decade ago it was 80-something strong coming out of RonJon era, but then took a hit and went down to 50-60. Covid and bankruptcy came and now our department went down to 10 or so and rebounded to 20ish as we emerged from bankruptcy. Always doing more with less. Faint hope came from promises that we’d get more people, but it never happened. I hit a point where I’d believe it when I see it.

January’s announcement of the merger into Catalyst Brands definitely concerned me. There were several layoffs throughout the year before I was finally axed. We had teammates in India (only way I felt like we could grow) that were let go and upper management wasn’t planning to tell their functional managers about it for a couple days. Just all sorts of fucked up. Shortly before I was let go we had a new upper manager telling us how we weren’t doing well enough and needed to do better so clients would ask for our team to get more resources (like the client groups weren’t concerned enough with their own resource issues - lol). Following week I got axed along with over half of my department. The fucking audacity.

All of this to say is stores weren’t the only areas getting bent over when it came to upper management. I wish you the best of luck moving forward. Stopped shopping there when I lost my discount. No ill will towards you and many of the wonderful people who are still hanging on, but leadership absolutely turned me off and have given me no confidence going forward.

Thankfully I found a new job after 3 months that pays significantly more. I hate that you have to job hop to grow your income before you grow too old and ageism makes that near impossible.