The wrong kind of battle.

Certainly, it's a horrible idea to demean and threaten your workers. At least, in such a noticeable, ill-meaning way that makes things uncomfortable. It was today that I found out just how far the separation was between the foot soldiers of Bergners and the generals. Oh, also the intelligence of my bosses as well.

Tim walked up to me with displeasure painted all over his face. For anyone else, it would be normal to have that happen, but he was a man of permanent happiness. He usually bounces around the store, spouting encouragement and such with helpful tips that every manager is suppose to state. But he does so with a kind of excitement that he is genuinely happy working here.

So for him to drop by my area with a face unlike the usual means something was up. And the way he stared at me meant he wasn't going to give me a positive term.

“Ryan,” he told me, “have you gotten any credits lately?”.

Credits/credit card sign up's are most important thing at this store. In most retail shops, they have something that keeps their customer coming back to them. Bergners has a credit card of sorts. But there are issues with that system, which I will detail in a second.
I replied that I haven't. I'm not sure why I even was asked that since he already knew.

“Well, you see....we are going to start cutting the hours of those with lower credits than the others...”

Oh! A threat! This is bad management right here, since what he did at that moment was basically take a swing. Someone needs a lesson in management!

Good management is when you sit down with your workers and tell them what has been going on, and see why there is an issue. Together, with team work, you figure it out and if later, more drastic measures are to be taken, then such can be performed.

They skipped that part, and decided to do bad management.

That is when you make your workers the enemy and treat them like cattle. If you are going to do that, do it like good management does and veil it with “assistance”. I didn't respond to this. I just kinda titled my head during his awkward explanation. When he left to tell the other departments about this new “policy”, I discussed with my coworker how much bullshit this is.

You see, getting a customer to sign a credit card is flawed by two things in our system:

1.Most customers already contain a Bergners card. In one week, I've maybe seen 3 people pay with something not the store credit card. And since these suckers don't expire (at least, not for a while), no one already containing one has no reason to sign up again.
2.There just isn't enough incentive to get one. Sure, you get a 10% off on the day you sign up (on select items, mind you), but what else? It doesn't help those that don't want to deal with the high interest rate this card radiates. It doesn't really help those in hard times because they have to pay it off eventually, and fashionable clothing just isn't a necessity in comparison to things like food.

The bigwigs at the corporate offices could easily correct those problems, but that would cost money. So, they attack the middlemen. The higher middlemen, the managers, threaten the smaller ones in return. And things like this could be avoided by simply having a sit down with everyone and figuring things out. But who wants convince?

So, I thank you Bergners'. Now I shall find a job twice as fast. No point in working where the employees aren't even liked.

{Note: Wrote this yesterday, posted today. Forgot to put that in here.}