The raven that’s been crapping all over the publications biz came a-tapping, gently rapping, on Bicycle Retailer & Industry News‘ door last Friday. Creative director Erik Haugli, graphic designer Wanda Williams, production manager Ron Bertola and classified sales rep/administrative assistant Stacey Smith all got laid off.
The headline on this news item was “BRAIN Realigns Staff to Boost Efficiency.” Just above it was an item on Cannondale shit-canning 92 people with the hed “Cannondale Completes Bedford Plant Layoffs.” I don’t suppose it feels any better to be realigned than to be laid off. But then I’ve only been laid off, job-wise. I leave the realignments to my chiropractor.
A somber tip of the Mad Dog fedora goes out to these latest casualties of the Great Recession. No journalists were harmed in the making of this realignment. Not yet, anyway.
Mad Blog Media 
WTF is happening to the American business mentality these days? Is there no loyalty, sense of right and wrong, no compassion at all? I felt it first hand and it sucked. It seems the Young Republican bunch of business owners all subscribe to one philosophy: Cut those that made you and work the young, dumb, and full of c#m to death for cheap. Or out source everything you can. I called today to cancel an on-line music subscription and after a 20 minute wait to speak to human being and I got a gentleman for what I presume was India. He tried his damnedest to talk me out of it, but finally gave it up when I asked him how the weather was in Delhi. But, I’d rather be jobless and homeless here than live in that shit hole. Ain’t life grand..
Gotta love Sani’s quote from the article:
“Because of the profitability of our print publication, we can remain the industry’s key source of news and information…” Yep, I was always waiting with baited breath for the BRAIN issues to hit the shop door. Nothing like reading about things in the “industry” magazine weeks AFTER they happened! And to top that off, I will not forget the time that we received the March 1st issue on April 2nd….and the March 15th issue on April 1st! Yep….if I wanted my “source of news and information” from a Pony Express rider hoped up on downers, alcohol and chocolate!
As much as I miss working in the bike industry, I can’t fathom how BRAIN stays around. The ONLY redeeming quality of the magazine were cartoons. And ‘maybe’ the Grapevine. But the rest of it was PR hacks writing PR fluff pieces about things which the “cycling media” had already covered to death.
// WTF is happening to the American business mentality these days? Is there no loyalty, sense of right and wrong, no compassion at all? //
Well, unless you’re selling compassion, that’s really beside the point. You have to make money to pay your employees, so it really is all about business. It’s all about the bottom line.
But …
Companies like Southwest put “employees” first in their mission statement, not because they’re nice guys, but because their business sense told them that happy employees lead to a good product which leads to increased revenues. There are tons of stories about Southwest where one unruly passenger complains about their service, and when it turns out the passenger was a drunk and out of line, they told the fucker off. Again, not because they’re nice guys, but because in the long run they wanted employees who thought the boss had their back, because they’d remember that down the line.
Sometimes you need the Glengarry Glen Ross approach: top employee gets a Caddy, second place is a set of steak knives, and third place, YOU’RE FIRED!! But in many, many cases, the company would benefit more if their employees thought they had some security. With security, you can invest in moving up and not have to spend your free time looking elsewhere. That’s what companies today are missing. They’d rather benefit from a very temporary stock price uptick (or, in most cases, from a very temporary not-going-down) than think long run.
This food writer in Seattle just wrote about a trip to Japan where he visited a tea shop that’s been open since the 1100s. Owned by the 24th generation from the same family. Can you imagine that happening over here? Anything lasting that long?
That’s our real problem. Not loyalty for the sake of loyalty, but loyalty because it’s a better long-term business strategy.
Part of the problem in this instance is that Bicycle Retailer & Industry News is published under license from Nielsen Company by NBDA Services Inc., a for-profit arm of the non-profit National Bicycle Dealers Association. As I understand it (not very well), the magazine is profitable and the website at least pays its way, but there are substantial rake-offs involved in this ownership-licensing arrangement. Add the sour economy and the traditional unwillingness of the bike biz to advertise and all of a sudden it’s “Houston, we have a problem.” Were BRAIN a standalone pub’ as it was back in the day, it probably would be fat and sassy.
Your local newspaper, if you still have one, is in a similar condition. If it were locally owned, it might be doing OK. Newspapers traditionally have been good earners, despite their old-school ways. But the Muthalode Morning Mishap has to kick back to the chain, which is top-heavy in overpaid management and has investors to reward, and so the local reporters, photographers, editors, Quark jockeys and ad sales people get it in the neck.
I’ve thought for a while now that BRAIN would be more valuable, news-wise, as an online publication. Bizniz types need to know what’s going on right now, not 30 days ago. But how do you make any money that way? Only the Wall Street Journal and the porn industry seem to have figured that out, and I hear even the porn folks are having to tighten the belts they mostly aren’t wearing.
Here’s an example of what my point was, from a personal perspective: I was the shop foreman at a large dealership for years. The service dept made money all the time. Efficiency and productivity were at the top of the scale. But as our labor rate increased, our commissions didn’t. “Adjustments” took care of that. Then, a new hot-shot GM takes over. He is there because the “the numbers could be better”, when in reality, the owner owed the kid’s father a few favors. First thing, cut vacation, sick pay, and jack up the insurance, cut back the 401k contribution. All the older employees got the pink slip in descending order according to seniority. Bigger work load for the writers, shop production and unapplied time suffered greatly, and general discontent from the work force. Commissions are way down and all of a sudden, turn-over is way up. A perfect example of steve o’s point on keeping the troops happy. The wheel was already invented and perfected, but the current regime can’t leave well enough alone, so all suffer.
Boz,
Yeah, we saw similar advancements in efficiency at newspapers during my career. When I started back in 1974, a copy editor edited copy and wrote headlines. When I quit in 1991, a copy editor edited copy, wrote headlines, designed pages and oversaw pasteup. Today’s copy editors often must handle pagination (Quark) and photo editing (Photoshop), too.
Samey same with the reporters. Once, a reporter reported. Now s/he must blog, shoot pix and video, create podcasts, and so on and so forth.
And people wonder why the press so often gets it wrong. The amazing thing is not how well the bear dances, but that it can dance at all.
I heard the Freakonomics boys on a TED talk the other day, going over the case study that got their ball rolling. They were studying big city drug dealers, and they couldn’t figure out why anyone would get into the business, because it was like freaking AMWAY. The guy at the very top made a lot of money, the guys at the next level knew what money looked like, and the troops never saw a penny.
(Funny observation was that most drug dealers have leased cars, gold-plated jewelry, and fake rolexes … just wasn’t the real money there that they liked to pretend there was.)
When they first wrote the paper, they thought that gangs functioned basically like any other franchised operation, even if they seemed to take the worst from all models instead of the best.
But looking back on their own work, they found that modern US CEOs have taken one page from the drug dealer playbook: whether times are good or bad, you have to over-pay the guy at the top, because money is how you decide who’s winning, and you have to keep the troops in line.
That was the only thing the gangs were doing “right” that kept them afloat: the idea that maybe you could be the 1% that made it to the top.
Seems to me the present state of the economy tells how well that theory works over the long haul. At least for we druts down in the trenches.
Workers of the world unite, etc., etc….
Khal,
What you may be missing is that the drug dealer analogy is not a long-term study of the economy, but a very short term view. As Steve points out it is not the pay which determines who is successful, but the presentation (or illusion) that there is money to be made. The local dope dealer on the street selling rock for a dime, is not making money because he/she gets ‘paid’ a commission based on the number of sales. And much like AMWAY, the more people you have selling the more commission you make. The problem is that in the dope ‘trade’ the price for not getting customers is usually a permanent one.
Essentially the drug trade is a pyramid scheme to the nth degree. The dope fiends have figured it out…..why haven’t the economists? One reason is because the theory that they are using is not accurate. It assumes that pay is what motivates employees, when (as the dope dealer analogy points out) in fact it is the “illusion” that you will make it to the top that keeps you getting paid for the work you do.
The chances that the local dope dealer makes it to the top are about 1%. The other 99% are either in jail, a cemetery, prison or out of the ‘trade’ altogether. And most of the 1% are living rent free with their moms!
Bringing this full circle: the only way to make a million dollars in the bike industry is to start with two million!