Hard to Reconcile
I had a conversation a while back with a representative of a large automotive program group. He was clearly a company man through and through. After our conversation was over, it was hard for me to reconcile some things that he said. I know of a few stores that had sold their stores to this program group over the years. The people that sold to this corporation told us that these corporate stores added more inventory and installed the latest and greatest store pos systems from the corporation. Also, it turned out that in each case the sales at these stores had dropped dramatically. I asked the representative if this was typical. He assured me that this was typical. He went on to say that the corporation would prefer to have another individual buy and run the store. He then said that what with the parts business like it is, there was little chance that somebody would want to buy a parts store. From what he said, it seems that a mega-corporation with unlimited cash, vast managerial skills and superb marketing skills can't find, train and retain managers that can run a parts store nearly as well as an owner. In other words these corporations don't know how to run individual stores well. However, these same corporations continue to try to convince the owners of affiliated stores to run their stores the same way that the corporations run their stores. Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." Either this corporation does not care if their affiliated store succeed or their management fits the definition of insanity. It seems to me that if the corporation wanted their affiliated stores to succeed, they would make it as easy as possible for the owners of the affiliated stores to run their stores however they want.Labels: insanity, Program group, Store POS System
posted by MIB @ 9:39 AM
<< Home