John Lewis - Never Knowingly Having Retail Experience.

[Bedrag Justesen]

59 minutes ago, swiss_democracy_for_all said:

To be fair, while she may have been a disastrous diversity hire, I can't see that anyone could change the general direction of these major high-street retailers, they're all going to end up in the same place eventually, bankrupt and sold off as flats.

For clothes and shoes shopping, we'll be sending off our 3D images of ourselves made from smartphone photographs taken from several angles with some measures given to websites. For those who want to see how things "look", before buying, stores will go online and VR headsets will get cheaper and more realistic.

One or two places might survive by setting themselves up as giant "Realfeel" stores where you pay a small entry fee but can test lots of different things, that might work as a business model. Normal shops are doomed IMO. 

 

Be circular.

When stores are gone manufacturers will need to bankroll their own touch and try spaces.

It's already happening from a decade ago with Sony and Samsung for starters.

They always lose a fortune and close.

Online retailers can be a parasitic business model which will die without their host.

[Frank Hovis]

Well personally I think that she has been the best chair of a public company since Paul "Uncle Monty" Flowers.

[spunko]

2 hours ago, swiss_democracy_for_all said:

To be fair, while she may have been a disastrous diversity hire, I can't see that anyone could change the general direction of these major high-street retailers, they're all going to end up in the same place eventually, bankrupt and sold off as flats.

For clothes and shoes shopping, we'll be sending off our 3D images of ourselves made from smartphone photographs taken from several angles with some measures given to websites. For those who want to see how things "look", before buying, stores will go online and VR headsets will get cheaper and more realistic.

One or two places might survive by setting themselves up as giant "Realfeel" stores where you pay a small entry fee but can test lots of different things, that might work as a business model. Normal shops are doomed IMO. 

 

I thought they had hired her to do the dirty work i.e. shut down most of the John Lewis stores and then sack her. But it seems like there are still loads still open.

They should go fully online for John Lewis and ditch the shops, excepting maybe a few 'key' sites in London.

If they brought back their generous warranty period that applies to most products, the boomers would rush back to buy - boomers and extended warranties go hand in hand, even though they're really just a junk product.

'Free' coffee and 'free' extended warranties = boomer heaven.

[sancho panza]

11 hours ago, Virgil Caine said:

I am pretty sure that Sharon’s bank balance and future pension entitlements indicate that it has not gone wrong for her at all. Not sure the other employees have much to cheer about.

Agreed.She's smart.Vety smart.Been paid best part of a £1mn p.a. for nearly four years despite losing lots of cash.

There's a load of traders in the basement who've made profits in that timefraem and not been paid a fraction of what she has.

Fair play to her.Shes very astute.

It's the minions aorking jsut above min wage who will pay the rpice ultimately as they're jobs will go.But they'd have gone anyway I guess.Sharon may have sped the process up or she may have slowed it.We'll never know.

If someone offered me the job for £250k I'd take it.ALthough I'd likely speed the decline.

[spygirl]

Ill include this entireily unrelated cut n paste from TE

Diversity initiatives in America are foundering

Joe Biden’s election sapped energy from the diversity business

Lofty goals are admirable in any organisation; just don’t forget the deliverables. Ibram X. Kendi managed the first part in pledging to “solve seemingly intractable racial problems of our time” when Boston University (bu) hired him in 2020. The scholar-activist—who says that racial disparities result from racist policies, and that a policy is racist if it yields racial disparities—was given the mandate and money to build an academic centre. He promised degree programmes, racial-justice training modules and more. But with a piddling output, despite having raised nearly $55m, his Centre for Antiracist Research has sacked about half its 40-odd staff and said it will scale back.

“I don’t know where the money is,” said Saida Grundy, a sociology professor at bu who briefly worked for the centre, to the Boston Globe. The university is investigating the centre’s use of grant money and “management culture”. Even those who once supported Mr Kendi’s hiring now see the enterprise as posturing flim-flam on the part of bu. “We marched for change and what did we get? Murals, right? The centre is the equivalent of a mural,” says Phillipe Copeland, a professor of social work at bu who was at the centre for two years.

The dust-up comes amid a re-evaluation of diversity, equity and inclusion (dei) initiatives in higher education, which exploded during Donald Trump’s presidency and after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. One push involved hiring more administrators focused on diversity. In 2021 the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, found that 65 universities representing 16% of four-year students employed 3.4 dei staff for every 100 tenured faculty. Many also started requiring tenure candidates to submit statements describing their commitment to dei.

Since Joe Biden’s election, Democrats have been less focused on racial injustice. Meanwhile, self-styled anti-woke politicians have pushed back. In May Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, approved a law barring public universities in the state from funding dei programmes with government money. Miffed students, he said, should “go to Berkeley”. In June his counterpart in Texas banned public universities there from requiring dei statements. The public-university systems in Missouri, North Carolina and Wisconsin have taken similar action. “In states where the rollback has happened, there’s been pressure from politicians to confront the excesses of dei policies,” says John Sailer of the National Association of Scholars, a conservative advocacy group.

Companies are also facing pushback over their dei initiatives, which range from hiring targets to mentorship schemes for minority employees. Though the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in June applied only to university admissions, conservative lawyers hope their challenges to such policies in the workplace will get a sympathetic hearing too. An outfit founded by Stephen Miller, who previously worked for the Trump administration, has asked the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate more than a dozen big firms for “policies that punish Americans for being white, Asian or male”. Edward Blum, who brought the affirmative-action case, is suing law firms over their recruitment programmes.

Offering, say, leadership training exclusively to minorities may be riskier after the Supreme Court ruling, but companies should be able to defend themselves if they make those opportunities available to everyone in other contexts, reckons Joan Williams of uc Law San Francisco. And under current law federal contractors—which include many large companies—are actually required to take steps to improve the diversity of their workforce.

Some firms may pare back dei programmes to avoid being sued. But for others, playing up dei efforts is good business—even if it does not actually yield more diversity. A working paper by Edward Watts of Yale and his colleagues found a large and growing number of “diversity washers”: listed firms that make hay of their dei commitments in financial filings despite not having many diverse employees. They got more money from funds geared towards environmental, social and governance investing.

 

Heres the bent black bastard scholar-activist

https://dailyfreepress.com/2023/10/02/ibram-x-kendi-responds-to-layoffs-allegations-in-qa/

https://www.spiked-online.com/video/the-fall-of-ibram-x-kendi/

 

[Funn3r]

On 17/10/2020 at 10:23, Bear Hug said:

  On 16/10/2020 at 16:14, spygirl said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-54558633

She looks a lot blacker than her promo piccies.

 

On 17/10/2020 at 10:23, Bear Hug said:

It's quite funny, as her looks don't match expected voice and accent. I am not saying it in any negative way, and it's not a comment on the content, just found it amusing. 

I don't play poker, or any card games, but friends say that bad players have a thing called a "tell" which is to say a body mannerism which is only displayed when they are bluffing.

It's interesting to watch her because every time she says something which she might reasonably consider false ("we will expand our business in..." , "our employee partners are our best asset") she shakes her head from side to side in a "no" movement.

[Funn3r]

On the subject of Waitrose

https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/two-waitrose-shoppers-trapped-in-endless-no-after-you-loop-20170713131815

[spygirl]

John Lewis Christmas advert: Venus flytrap is the star as retailer rings the changes

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67289429

Happy Kwanza?

 

[spygirl]

Many of this year's ads are fronted by A-list stars, from Michael Bublé and Rick Astley to Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

Shes doign MnS too!

The tart.

 

MnS also have the RoboSex Giant too - 

[spygirl]

A better class of high rise scum ....

Notre/ Id quite liek to *rent* in a high rise - providing it wasnt filled up with the usual scum you find in high rise.

High density housing is fine - as long as its not jobless scummers.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12880137/john-lewis-slammed-flats-london.html

 

[Boon]

Seems that most south London rail interchanges have massive blocks of similar popping up next to them, this isn't on a residential street or blocking any view either. So I can't see why it could get declined. Sutton has several, for instance.

They won't be for sale and the BTR model currently seems to operate on profit maximisation rather than filling as many units as possible. So they will be priced at the top end of the market and get a clientele to match, nobody on benefits or low incomes is gonna be staying here, also unlikely you will get slumlord subletting 10 to a room either.

Its funny it mentions Masons Hill and how their apartments are acceptable, seem to recall that street has several blocks of smaller new builds constructed anything 10-15 years ago and many of these struggle to sell relative to the amount of listings or appreciate in real price.

So I could bet that most of the objections come from the owners of these flats, and I bet a lot of these blocks have residents groups which have banded together to get more complaints in. Nothing to do with the development at all, but rather that rich people with more money than sense or kids with indiscriminate BOMAD have somewhere different to spend their cash. 

[Ash4781b]

https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/27/john-lewis-waitrose-jobs-cuts-redundancy-pay
 

“The owner of John Lewis and Waitrose is considering cutting up to 11,000 staff jobs in the next five years, after the retail group slashed redundancy terms this week.

Sources said at least 10% of the staff-owned business’s 76,000-strong workforce could go across the group’s head office, supermarkets and department stores.

Department heads are working on plans and the number of roles in the business is expected to be gradually reduced over several years via redundancies and not replacing staff who leave, sources said.

…

In an internal memo issued on Thursday, first reported by the Telegraph, the John Lewis Partnership said: “Against all of our competing priorities for investment, it’s fair to say that the high cost of redundancy pay has been one of the things that’s prevented us from moving as quickly as we’ve wanted to transform ourselves for the future, and has restricted our ability to invest more in pay.”

It added that it was raising the minimum redundancy payment for those who did not qualify for the full partnership package from one week’s pay to four weeks to “better support those with shorter service who are affected by redundancy”.”

 

According to that article made quite a big change to the redundancy pay. Quite sad really as not great for morale but most saw it coming. They needed a juggernaut/ industry veteran but put the wrong person in. Now they going to have morale issues I think. What a total f’ up

[One percent]

14 minutes ago, Ash4781b said:

https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/27/john-lewis-waitrose-jobs-cuts-redundancy-pay
 

“The owner of John Lewis and Waitrose is considering cutting up to 11,000 staff jobs in the next five years, after the retail group slashed redundancy terms this week.

Sources said at least 10% of the staff-owned business’s 76,000-strong workforce could go across the group’s head office, supermarkets and department stores.

Department heads are working on plans and the number of roles in the business is expected to be gradually reduced over several years via redundancies and not replacing staff who leave, sources said.

…

In an internal memo issued on Thursday, first reported by the Telegraph, the John Lewis Partnership said: “Against all of our competing priorities for investment, it’s fair to say that the high cost of redundancy pay has been one of the things that’s prevented us from moving as quickly as we’ve wanted to transform ourselves for the future, and has restricted our ability to invest more in pay.”

It added that it was raising the minimum redundancy payment for those who did not qualify for the full partnership package from one week’s pay to four weeks to “better support those with shorter service who are affected by redundancy”.”

 

According to that article made quite a big change to the redundancy pay. Quite sad really as not great for morale but most saw it coming. They needed a juggernaut/ industry veteran but put the wrong person in. Now they going to have morale issues I think. What a total f’ up

Can an employer arbitrarily change your contractual arrangement?   

[Ash4781b]

2 minutes ago, One percent said:

Can an employer arbitrarily change your contractual arrangement?   

Dunno. Yes I speculate because they might argue paying out on old model would collapse the company 

[One percent]

Just now, Ash4781b said:

Dunno. Yes I speculate because they might argue paying out on old model would collapse the company 

If it collapses if they don’t screw over their staff, then I would argue that it shouldn’t exist in the first place.  

[Funn3r]

2 hours ago, One percent said:

Can an employer arbitrarily change your contractual arrangement?   

I've had plenty of run-ins with this sort of thing. HR know they can't say "your t&c are too advantageous" so they very much tend to ramble on about them being "old-fashioned", "belonging in the past", "no longer appropriate for our modern business."

They are very good at making it sound like inevitable fact due to the passage of time and I've seen naive employees just sit there and accept that their fuddy-duddy old stuff is not there any more.

Whenever they try this one I ostentatiously open up my notepad and hover my pen over it. "Ah right, I see, so can you tell me the date on which these old terms became no longer valid?"

[JFK]

On 27/01/2024 at 13:18, Funn3r said:

I've had plenty of run-ins with this sort of thing. HR know they can't say "your t&c are too advantageous" so they very much tend to ramble on about them being "old-fashioned", "belonging in the past", "no longer appropriate for our modern business."

They are very good at making it sound like inevitable fact due to the passage of time and I've seen naive employees just sit there and accept that their fuddy-duddy old stuff is not there any more.

Whenever they try this one I ostentatiously open up my notepad and hover my pen over it. "Ah right, I see, so can you tell me the date on which these old terms became no longer valid?"

That's fantastic, I must remember that one too. Good stuff.

 

[ashestoashes]

they're running the risk that the 11,000 partners let go will set up a rival and be more successful

[wherebee]

50 minutes ago, ashestoashes said:

they're running the risk that the 11,000 partners let go will set up a rival and be more successful

The JL partnership model has been hated by the city for decades - no way to take your cut as a bankster, no way of loading it with debt and then cashing in before the implosion.  No way of offshoring everything, as the partnership members get the (short term) profits which would accrue.

I am surprised it's been allowed to live as long as it has.  I suspect, although you'd never prove it, the diversity hire was pushed by city types to idiot selectors on grounds of 'diversity' whilst they actually wanted to destroy the JL business and knew that a diversity hire would almost guarantee it.

[Don Coglione]

24 minutes ago, wherebee said:

The JL partnership model has been hated by the city for decades - no way to take your cut as a bankster, no way of loading it with debt and then cashing in before the implosion.  No way of offshoring everything, as the partnership members get the (short term) profits which would accrue.

I am surprised it's been allowed to live as long as it has.  I suspect, although you'd never prove it, the diversity hire was pushed by city types to idiot selectors on grounds of 'diversity' whilst they actually wanted to destroy the JL business and knew that a diversity hire would almost guarantee it.

Do you think she knows it? Imagine knowing that you had been appointed solely for the colour of your skin and what that knowledge would do to your self-belief.

[wherebee]

5 hours ago, Don Coglione said:

Do you think she knows it? Imagine knowing that you had been appointed solely for the colour of your skin and what that knowledge would do to your self-belief.

in my experience, almost everyone at that level of management has utter belief in their brilliance.  black, white, whatever, they never ever think they are not best for the job.

[Innkeeper]

8 hours ago, Don Coglione said:

Do you think she knows it? Imagine knowing that you had been appointed solely for the colour of your skin and what that knowledge would do to your self-belief.

Doesn’t seem to bother the film, tv and advertising industry who’s entire selection basis now appears to be on this principle.....

[Funn3r]

Sharon White also responsible in the Horizon Post Office scandal, note the cc: list

 

 

[sancho panza]

It was the coofs fault,nothing to do with Sharon and Nish not being good enough.Tesco and Sainsburys have had the same problem.... cough cough....

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/30/john-lewis-return-to-profit-dame-sharon-white/

John Lewis on track to return to profit, says Dame Sharon White

Retailer will ‘more than break-even’ as it prepares to slash up to 11,000 jobs

John Lewis will return to profit this year, its chairman Dame Sharon White has said, as the retailer prepares to cut as many as 11,000 jobs as part of a drastic turnaround plan.

Dame Sharon told staff that the partnership, which also owns Waitrose, will “more than break-even” after it slumped to a £234m loss last year.

In a video message, Dame Sharon told employees to prepare for “quite big changes and quite bold changes”.

It comes just days after it emerged that John Lewis was considering cutting its 76,000 strong workforce by at least 10pc, or 11,000 staff, over the next five years. It is also cutting redundancy pay in half for staff, saying it needed to make this more affordable.

Dame Sharon said: “There’s been an awful lot of change over the past year. But those efforts are starting to show themselves in our commercial performance, we are converting more of our sales into return to partners, and we will more than breakeven this year, which is a great start as we build back to sustainable profit for the business.”

A return to profitability will provide a major boost for John Lewis after posting a loss for the last three consecutive years and warning that its turnaround had been delayed.

In September, Dame Sharon said John Lewis would not return to a sustainable profit before the 2027/28 financial year.

Nish Kankiwala, the John Lewis Partnership’s chief executive, also said at the time performance was improving but “customers are feeling the pinch”. “Therefore, it’s difficult to give a more specific guidance in relation to numbers,” he added.

 

 

John Lewis is currently in the process of stripping £900m worth of costs out of the business.

Dame Sharon and Mr Kankiwala said in the memo sent to employees on Monday that layoffs would be a last resort, adding that the partnership was already having to replace 30,000 workers every year who were leaving.

They added: “We will make changes through natural turnover wherever possible.”

Dame Sharon made the announcement as she unveiled wider plans for John Lewis’s turnaround.

All staff in its Waitrose supermarkets will get customer service training for the first time in an effort to turnaround falling sales. The supermarket has previously only offered specialist training to some workers.

It follows criticism from shoppers over worsening customer service in its supermarkets, leading more people to switch to rival supermarket Marks & Spencer. John Lewis admitted in documents this week that it had “lost ground on customer sentiment”.

Edited January 30 by sancho panza

[GTM]

4 minutes ago, sancho panza said:

It comes just days after it emerged that John Lewis was considering cutting its 76,000 strong workforce by at least 10pc, or 11,000 staff

Imagine being this innumerate.