Tweeter cuts head office headcount by half

No great surprise here:

TWICE: Tweeter Parent Halves Corporate Staff

Tweeter’s corporate staff was cut by half on
Friday to eliminate red tape and bureaucracy, the retailer’s new owners
said.
Tweeter chairman George Schultze, principal of Schultze Asset
Management, told TWICE that the cuts were difficult but “absolutely necessary”
in order to reduce excess corporate overhead which was “choking the
stores.”
Schulze confirmed that approximately 80 staffers were let go, most
based at Tweeter headquarters here, and that all departments were affected.
Tweeter’s senior management team was not yet impacted, he said. The executive
staff includes CEO Joe McGuire and senior VPs Gregory Hunt (chief financial
officer), Robert Staples (sales and installation services), Philo Pappas (chief
merchandising officer), Patrick Reynolds (chief marketing officer) and William
Morrison (chief information officer).
The downsizing was limited almost exclusively to
corporate staff, Schulze noted, and there were no reductions in stores or
store-level personnel. There are no plans to divest the headquarters facility,
although some of the excess space may be sublet.

Look at any struggling retailer, and you will always see an overstaffed and inefficient management structure. It seems that if a company lacks a concrete vision and a firm hand, Org Charts metastasize into huge bloated constructions, speckled with redundancies.

Making those decisions is hard, but necessary to get a retailer back on track. You have to ask, in the manner of the Two Bobs from the movie Office Space "What do you do here?"

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