Earlier this weekend I mentioned a stint in my youth where I worked as a Multi-Store Manager for Sunglass Hut. It immediately preceeded my career with Sony, and was, overall, a great experience. However, with over 1500 outlets world wide, they count as a very large company, and I did sometimes have surreal experiences that were straight out of Dilbert.
One Thursday, the computer/Point of Sale terminal at one of my stores died. It just flat out died. After a quick phone call to tech support, they determined that it was dead for good, and promised to courier me a new machine. Since it wouldn't arrive before Monday, my staff and I rang up manual invoices that day, and through the weekend. Fortunately, the bank card machine was working independently, so we could process debit and credit card transactions, as well as cash.
That Monday, a new computer arrived as promised. After hooking it up, I manually keyed in all the transactions from the previous four days. Since it was a bright and sunny July, there were a lot of them. Regardless, I got it done, and that night the computer polled our results, and we were back to normal.
Three weeks later, I recieved a letter from the President of Sunglass Hut. Apparently, on that particular Monday three weeks prior, my one store had been the number one Sunglass Hut in the entire world. No mention of the fact that the polled results for the prior four days had been zero, just a big warm fuzzy attaboy for being Number One. As far as I could guess, Head Office generated these letters every day of every week, spreading the love.
The moral of the story: it doesn't matter what the underlying reasons for the numbers are, as long as they look good.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
A mildly amusing story about Sunglass Hut
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1 comment:
The one thing EVERYBODY who taught me anything about business agreed on was that "it's all about the numbers".
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