Most retail CEOs don't reserve much time for popping into stores and talking to customers, and store and district managers tend to dislike it--feels like micromanaging.
But at the same time, store managers and district managers are often not eager to feed a list of their stores' shortcomings up the chain of command. IMO it's a rare retail manager who is willing to stand up and say, "my store is bad and here is what I need to make it good." Most focus on putting the best possible face on things, internally. It's so hard to make good numbers in retail and there is so much pressure to do so... relationships between the management layers can often feel more adversarial than collaborative.
As malls disappear it would be nice if the multi-restaurant open and shared dining experience was preserved.
I never get this: you start a conversation and then when the other party engages you disengage. The CEO's response was about as good as you could wish for and would give an opportunity to influence the view of the company at the level where it matters. That's what you intend when you write to the CEO, you do that because they are the people that can make stuff happen, including putting you in touch with the right person further down the org, not because you want to chat with the CEO. They're just a very visible access point and writing them a letter is a way of saying 'this really matters to me'.
If you are too busy to follow up on such a response then maybe you could save everybody time by not writing the letter in the first place.
The District Manager left a voicemail for me asking when he could schedule a tour with me. He was 100% polite, but it sounded like he was gritting his teeth.
Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I interpreted it as, "My boss's boss is forcing me to give an idiot like you, someone probably with no experience in retail economics, a tour while I patiently pretend to listen to how you tell me to do my job better than me, a person with decades of experience in selling video games."
If the situation were reversed I wouldn't want some rando customer coming into my job and telling me everything he thinks I'm doing wrong.
Plus, I got the feeling (again, just my perception) that it would just be "here's what's wrong with this store" instead of "here's what's wrong with all of your stores."
Maybe it was all in my head and they would have taken me seriously, I don't know. But that was the impression I got.
And I was legitimately busy. Writing a letter takes 10 minutes, a tour and presentation of my ideas would obviously take a lot longer.
Whether the district manager liked it or not, they absolutely would have had to report the results of your visit back to the CEO. And they would have had to be honest about it, since they knew the CEO could just call you back to check the accuracy.
I don't blame you for not wanting to get in the middle of that, but I bet the CEO felt like it was a missed opportunity.
They are just incredibly effective sociopaths.
I'm not even sure if I'm joking.
I mean it's a bit as if you complained in a restaurant that the food was bad and they proposed that you visited the kitchen and told them what you'd do differently. I don't want to do that, actually I'm probably not even qualified to do that and if I was I probably wouldn't do it for free.
It's very kind and considerate for the CEO to take time to schedule something like that but I don't find it weird at all that he declined the offer.
"Definitely! How's the day after tomorrow sound?"
seen: 4 days ago
Also: Paul may simply not have been the right person to be there because he's too far removed from the floor to make a meaningful contribution. Delegation to the right person in the org is the hallmark of a good manager.
The company should be grateful for whatever "help" (or pointers to improvement) they can get - even if it's just a letter - way more preferable than a rant on the phone or slating on social media.
That's a promising punch line.
i didn't know paul before he died (on my birthday even), but because of your comment, i researched his story
i work in sales, so rejection and silence are very frequent. it is rare for anyone to connect through writing or through voice, and quite often i feel like nobody desires to brainstorm and have fun thinking about ideas in a low pressure environment
i wish you well in life and i hope that we can both live every day to the fullest-- because not all of us have the luxury of time
Thanks for writing Jim :)
(check out that username) vouched
I think it's perfectly reasonable to have people socially pressure others to keep to the agreed upon conventions of communication. (It's kind of what this place is known for.)
If someone wants to do it in a funny way, all the better. Humor wins hearts and minds.
I don't understand the ignoring of basic writing conventions thing. If you think that's going to make your writing stand out, or be more expressive or whatever, you're wrong.
It is less expressive, and it only stands out for being disorienting and unpleasant to look at and read.
Seeing people write like this brings to mind this quote.
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Write with the standard conventions, so that what stands out are your ideas, not the reader's effort to piece together your loose ends.
I think you misunderstood my post, I wasn't bemoaning that everyone's grammar isn't perfect.
I was pointing out that the things learned very early in language education, capitalization and punctuation are learned for a reason. And intentionally omitting them is distracting and detracts from what is trying to be said.
Rather than focus on the content and the ideas evoked, just make a passive-aggresive snark so that you gain useless points by people who couldn't give a crap about the discussion but found the comment funny.
After that, you can just ignore that person's opinions since they obviously are too incompetent to write in proper form.
You learn early on the importance of good language skills, you also ought to learn how to treat people with some respect by trying to ignore the minor things and not showcase them off like you've found anything worth of value.
If you value properly written text over others, fair enough, but don't waste your time and everyone's time by making a comment that contributes to nothing but elitistic egos.
How depressing it is that the only response to my initial comment is talking about punctuation. My grammar is actually correct, too. Instead of using periods, I hit enter. Instead of capitalizing "I", I used "i" instead because I feel it is quicker, still readable, and unique.
I guess any publicity is good publicity!
> If you value properly written text over others, fair enough, but don't waste your time and everyone's time by making a comment that contributes to nothing but elitistic egos.
Well said, this is the gist of it. Sometimes it can be tasteful, other times it's like those posts that we try to avoid here on HN such as "thanks", "lol" etc. Posts that just add uneeded noise.
Mainly I complained how terrible the store experience was. Whereas Apple stores feel like an avant-garde museum Gamestops feel like the inside of a Chuck E. Cheese circa 1987 -- games everywhere, no real organization, no marketing of individual titles or genres, it's just grabbag nonsense of plastic container after plastic container.
Days after I sent the letter, his secretary called me and scheduled a phone call for the next day.
Paul could not have been nicer. He said he appreciated the criticism and offered to have his district manager tour a location with me so I could share in greater depth my concerns.
I declined (too busy) but was obviously taken aback with his generosity and patience.
Sadly, he passed away in March of this year from brain cancer at the very young age of 53.
He had no real incentive to respond to an angry letter from a random customer, but he went way out of his way to at least listen to me (even if the stores haven't improved much).
R.I.P. Paul.