The best $600 per employee ever spent!

[jmowreader]

Home Depot's CEO Bob Nardelli and the company which employed him parted ways yesterday.

We gave him, all tolled, a $220 million severance package. One of our number did a quick calculation and discovered that it cost the Company about $600 per employee to get rid of him.

We consider it money well spent.

[BlueJazz]

1. They should have charged HIM 220 Million ....

...and given each Employee $1200.00

[jmowreader]

10. Just getting rid of the sorry fucker is enough

No one likes the guy. This is like Christmas in January, man, we're all dancing around on cloven hooves in glee.

[lapfog_1]

2. Now imagine that they simply fired his ass

with the typical 2 weeks severance and then offered the employees a $600 bonus for better performance in the next quarter. Do you think HD's stock value would increase a bit? Maybe even enough to continue to offer these top to bottom performance bonuses?

[jmowreader]

6. I KNOW HD's stock value increased eight percent the day we canned him

[AlCzervik]

3. i worked for HD pre Nardelli and it was a much better company before he got

there.

[Gormy Cuss]

4. May his successor be cut from a better bolt.

HD store were better years ago and now the ones near me are pretty much train wrecks.

[jmowreader]

8. His successor is Frank Blake

Check out http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/4443025.html.

Turns out it was $210 million. Oops.

Now to put that into perspective: Last year, The Home Depot created a new incentive program called "Orange Juiced!" to reward us for excellent customer service. Orange Juiced (I like to call it "Orange Crushed" for reasons too numerous to explain here) works off the Voice of the Customer surveys. They put $30 million aside for this initiative.

It seems to be seven times as profitable to fuck up the company as it is to do good there. Valuable lesson for life.

[Warpy]

5. he was certainly a piss poor manager

and will undoubtedly retire to some gold plated mansion in the Caribbean while we all wish for well aimed hurricanes.

Home Depot stores under his leadership were poorly stocked and poorly staffed. They got rid of all the old codgers who knew how to do things in favor of teenagers and twentysomethings who were cheaper, especially part time, who didn't know how to do anything but put the decreasing stock onto the shelves.

And Nardelli STILL managed to lose a fortune!

[jmowreader]

7. Nardelli was big on "metrics"

My favorite :sarcasm: metric is Sales per Staff Hour.

Basically, each department has a number of dollars each associate is supposed to generate per hour. (We take the whole day's total and divide by 15--if we were measuring it on an actual hourly basis I'd be screwed because I'm there two hours before the store opens every day.) Let's say my guys are supposed to generate $500 per hour. (Each department is different.) According to the metrics, I can afford one guy on the floor at a time between the first of February and the first of April. The problem with this happy state of affairs is that it's not possible to sell lumber with one person because lumber dealing means forklift driving and you can't move a forklift in a customer-accessible area without a ground guide to keep pedestrians from getting squished.

Home Depot watchers might remember that the slogan on our aprons is now "I Put Customers First." Supposedly we were getting a little away from the metrics and going back to taking care of customers. They need to pitch about two-thirds of the fucking metrics and just let us take care of customers.

Oh, and they need to eradicate the fucking Home Depot cheer. We don't say it every day like Wal-Mart does theirs, but that we say it at all is kinda stupid.

[AlCzervik]

9. monthly meetings at 5:00am on a sunday morning--like torture but not

as enjoyable.

[jmowreader]

12. Now they're quarterly

They're also worse than before. At least before we had merit badges (get five, turn them in and it's $100 in your next paycheck) and Employee of the Month awards ($75 in your next paycheck). Now we still have to listen to the store manager telling us The Secrets of Retail Success, but the only real reward we get is donuts.

[AlCzervik]

15. i still have merit badges hanging around somewhere, i should send them to you

i worked at the expo for a year and it was somewhat better than the depot, not much mind you but the working conditions were better.

[Selatius]

20. Maybe if they let workers on the ground manage Home Depot, things would run better.

I often find workers on the front line and first level managers know what the hell is going on more than higher level executives, and I figure the best way to run the enterprise is to give the workers leeway in making decisions on how things should operate. I mean, they're on the fucking workshop floor. They know what's going on.

[jmowreader]

22. In the Bernie and Arthur era, that's how it worked

There's a reason the corporate office is called the Store Support Center--we were originally set up so that the stores called the shots, and corporate took care of things like paying invoices. Then came Bob (ugh) Nardelli, who implemented GE's operating system here.

Let's throw out an example of some thing that was real easy under B&A and is damn near impossible under Bob: turning off a SKU. In the very old days, to get a product taken out of your set was easy--prove it doesn't sell well, ask for it to go away and it will. I have been trying to get my R-15 insulation turned off. The shit sells when the whole town is out of R-13 insulation and someone's got to insulate a house so they can drywall it and get paid. Otherwise, it sits on the floor until it fades to yellow. I want it gone. I call the buying office and they tell me that because it sells every eleven weeks we have to keep it. (You read right: five people a year buy any of it.)

[leftofthedial]

11. screwing workers

pays good

[Telly Savalas]

13. I'm very qualified to be Home Depot's ex-CEO.

I have beer in the fridge and am very quick with the TV remote -- a crucial part of the skill set required for the job of sitting around doing jackshit all day.

Unlike Nardelli, I'd be willing to be the ex-CEO for a mere $200K a year with health insurance and dental plan for my family. Anybody have the email addresses for the board of directors so I can send 'em my resume?

[Cleita]

14. $600 per employee?

Why do the employees have to pay?

[jmowreader]

18. Figure of speech...

We didn't have to pay, although given the chance most of us would have thrown in a buck or so for a going-away party. ("Going-away party" is an old Field Station Berlin figure of speech. Back when I was there we had two kinds of departure parties for troops in the command, and which one you got said a lot about what everyone else thought of you. The Farewell Party was for people we liked. We'd put up posters a week or so in advance, the guest of honor was there, everyone had a great time. The Going-Away Party...we'd still put up the posters a week or so in advance and everyone would have a great time, but they were scheduled for the day after you left.)

It's like the "sales per associate" figure where they take the total sales in the whole store, and divide by the total number of people working there, which gives you a weirdly distorted figure because last I checked, the person who counts the till drops in the vault doesn't have direct customer contact.Or contact with very many of us, for that matter.

[B Calm]

21. Employees have been paying for CEO's fat compensations

for years. Did you know that working people wages have been stagnant?

[sasquatch]

16. And they wonder why our "leadership" in America is gone

Hell the fucking boomers have given us the laziest dumbfuck leaders, both corporate and political, in the history of the UNITED STATES!! Jesus this guy gets 220 million for being a fuck up! What happened to just giving the guy a boot in the ass as he left.

[Liberal In Texas]

17. Is it safe to start shopping there again? n/t

[jmowreader]

19. Not yet...

the corporate office is still full of Repukes. Also, the guy who replaced Nardelli was Nardelli's second-in-command for the last five years.

[meldroc]

23. Sounds like when Carly Fiorina left HP.

I wasn't even working at HP when her departure was announced, but we were all dancing a jig and singing "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" after she "resigned." Of course, she got the multi-million dollar golden parachute, which irritated me - she gets paid more for being fired than I'll see in my entire life.

God I hated that bitch. She just completely ran HP into the ground, and the company's still cleaning up the mess.