The Ten Dumbest Things Ames Ever Did

[TheFugitive]

In no particular order this is my shortlist of the Ten Dumbest Things that Ames ever did.
At least during my time with the company in the late 1980's up through the first bankruptcy.
(I'm sure that through the acquisition of Hills and the second Bankruptcy they came up with
ten more equally dumb things).

Breaking ad circulars on a Thursday.   When I was with Ames our ads ran Thursday thru Wednesday of the following week.  Like a lot of discounters we always struggled to remain in-stock on sale merchandise.  We'd get goods in for the ad and the prices would take effect Thursday morning.  Most often we were sold out of many ad goods by Friday afternoon, meaning that we were setting up to disappoint and anger a whole lot of customers on Saturday, our busiest day of the week.  Ames managed to alienate a whole lot of customers who made the trip in on a Saturday morning only to find out that the item they saw in the sale circular was already gone.  Breaking the ads on Saturday when most people were off of work and planned to do their shopping would have meant a whole lot more happy customers.

Printing and distributing a Bomb Threat Checklist to every store in the chain.  Among the many forms in my office were pads of the Ames Bomb Threat Checklist.  Per policy a pad was to be kept at the service desk in case a bomb threat was phoned in.  The procedure was (and I am NOT making this up) that the girl at the desk was to grab the pad and a pencil and begin asking the caller questions such as "Where is the bomb?  Why did you plant the bomb? Who are you? Where are you?" and other equally ridiculous stuff.  Of course while that was going on nobody was evacuating the building or calling 911.

Maintaining overlapping Ames and Zayre back office facilities after the merger.   When I joined Ames we would send out a daily package of reports, bank deposit slips, and various other paperwork to the HQ in Rocky Hill.  We were provided a set of red cloth bags which were pre-addressed for this purpose.  You'd toss all the stuff into a bag, take it down to receiving and send it out to Connecticut via UPS.  After the Zayre acquisition however Ames decided that they did not want to close down the sister Zayre facility in Syracuse, New York which served this function for obscure political reasons.  So they divided the tasks between Syracuse and Rocky Hill and provided us a new set of blue cloth bags pre-addressed for Syracuse.  Now each day your office girl would have to go through all of the reports and paperwork and sort them (this one goes to Syracuse....this one to Rocky Hill.....Syracuse, Rocky Hill) and place them in the corresponding red or blue bag.  Then both bags got shipped out UPS, essentially DOUBLING our daily shipping charges for this across what at the time was an 800-store chain. Plus the labor and time it took so sort all of that.

Staying open until midnight in small-town rural locations.   This would happen at Christmastime when the chain went to extended hours.  They had me open every night until midnight in a town of 3000 people.  There was hardly a soul in the building after ten, and when there was they were generally only a couple of miscreants who were there to shoplift.

Using cashiers' Social Security Numbers as their login ID.   Granted many chains were doing this at the time, as identity theft was not really a thing yet.  But we actually had employees keying in their SSN to sign-on to their registers, AND their SSN appeared on THE CUSTOMER'S RECEIPT which allowed us to know who had rang the sale in case the customer came back with a problem later on.  In hindsight it boggles the mind that we ever did that.

Sending a senior HR executive in an expensive suit out to the stores to explain to employees that we only paid minimum wage because that's all the money they really needed. Ames was always very concerned about any attempts to organize a union in their stores, and this was particularly true when we went into Michigan, which was a very pro-union state.  The company did a number of things to try and pre-empt any organizing and one of them was to send a well-dressed senior HR exec out to talk to the employees on the issue of pay.  I watched this man stand before an employee meeting at our store and tell them right to their faces that "Ames pays minimum wage because these jobs are supplemental income for students and housewives.  They really aren't jobs that anyone sustains themselves on, and they weren't meant to be".  I looked around the room and realized that at least ¾ of the people he was speaking to DID rely on their Ames job as their primary source of income.  Many of them were single moms.  He actually angered a lot of them and made employee relations much worse.

Making store management conduct employee performance reviews in order to hand out raises of 25 cents an hour (or less).  At that time 25 cents was about the largest raise they'd let us give.  Most got less than that, or nothing at all.  Yet we in management were required to fill out detailed performance evaluations in painstaking detail and sit with employees to review them in order to justify a piddling raise of 0 to 25 cents.  And since it all had to fall within a set budget they wanted you to be especially critical at times to justify the fact that some employee was only getting a nickel.  The quarter did not really motivate anybody and making them sit through reviews to get it just made us all look ridiculous.

Opening a store on the frozen tundra of Northern Michigan in mid-February. I did a grand opening in Houghton Lake, Michigan in February.  It was a remote location (the northernmost store Ames had in Michigan, perhaps in the company outside of Maine).  I mean, really, if the construction schedule slips and you miss Christmas, why bother?  Just wait till the following Christmas, or at least till a pleasant Summer day when you can do things up right with hot dogs and balloons.  The temperature never broke 13 Farenheit the entire week I was there.  Most locals ignored us in preference to their favorite activity, which was ice fishing.

Sponsoring a race car as the company was going bankrupt.   Shortly before our first Chapter 11 filing Ames decided to sponsor a race car (I don't remember exactly if it was NASCAR or Indy or what circuit).  As you can imagine when vendors weren't getting paid, employees weren't getting bonuses, stores were closing costing people their jobs, and the stock was tanking no employees, vendors or shareholders were very happy to see that money had gone to pay for this logo that was racing around on the track.

The whole Zayre acquisition in general. It really made no sense.  Zayre had a bunch of big, dirty, broken-down stores in major urban areas like Boston and Chicago.  Ames was more of a small-town merchant.   We sold pillow shams with Country Geese.  You would not find anything remotely close to that in a Zayre store.  They were being bled dry by bad credit practices and high shrink.  We were doing fairly well, having digested G.C. Murphy to become a 300 store chain.  The acquisition started Ames on the long downward skid to oblivion, while Zayre Corp, free of it's albatross discount stores, was able to reorganize and do quite nicely as TJX Corp., parent of Marshall's and T.J. Maxx.  It was a shotgun wedding that made absolutely no sense. Peter Hollis had been CEO of both companies and we were left with only speculation as to why he might be throwing a lifeline to his buddies over there.

[BillyGr]

Breaking ad circulars on a Thursday.   When I was with Ames our ads ran Thursday thru Wednesday of the following week.  Like a lot of discounters we always struggled to remain in-stock on sale merchandise.  We'd get goods in for the ad and the prices would take effect Thursday morning.  Most often we were sold out of many ad goods by Friday afternoon, meaning that we were setting up to disappoint and anger a whole lot of customers on Saturday, our busiest day of the week.  Ames managed to alienate a whole lot of customers who made the trip in on a Saturday morning only to find out that the item they saw in the sale circular was already gone.  Breaking the ads on Saturday when most people were off of work and planned to do their shopping would have meant a whole lot more happy customers.

Seems that they should have just sent more stock of the sales items to each store to begin with - maybe even send a few cases with instructions not to put those out until later of Friday evening if need be so that they would be there for Saturday?

Maintaining overlapping Ames and Zayre back office facilities after the merger.   When I joined Ames we would send out a daily package of reports, bank deposit slips, and various other paperwork to the HQ in Rocky Hill.  We were provided a set of red cloth bags which were pre-addressed for this purpose.  You'd toss all the stuff into a bag, take it down to receiving and send it out to Connecticut via UPS.  After the Zayre acquisition however Ames decided that they did not want to close down the sister Zayre facility in Syracuse, New York which served this function for obscure political reasons.  So they divided the tasks between Syracuse and Rocky Hill and provided us a new set of blue cloth bags pre-addressed for Syracuse.  Now each day your office girl would have to go through all of the reports and paperwork and sort them (this one goes to Syracuse....this one to Rocky Hill.....Syracuse, Rocky Hill) and place them in the corresponding red or blue bag.  Then both bags got shipped out UPS, essentially DOUBLING our daily shipping charges for this across what at the time was an 800-store chain. Plus the labor and time it took so sort all of that.

Would have been more logical (if they had a reason to keep both places open) to simply allow both places to do all the tasks, and split the stores - the 400 closer to Syracuse send everything there, the 400 closer to Rocky Hill send everything there.

Using cashiers' Social Security Numbers as their login ID.   Granted many chains were doing this at the time, as identity theft was not really a thing yet.  But we actually had employees keying in their SSN to sign-on to their registers, AND their SSN appeared on THE CUSTOMER'S RECEIPT which allowed us to know who had rang the sale in case the customer came back with a problem later on.  In hindsight it boggles the mind that we ever did that.

It does sound strange today, but as you say it was quite common at one time for places to request that number, so probably not so surprising that a store would do so as well.

The whole Zayre acquisition in general. It really made no sense.  Zayre had a bunch of big, dirty, broken-down stores in major urban areas like Boston and Chicago.  Ames was more of a small-town merchant.   We sold pillow shams with Country Geese.  You would not find anything remotely close to that in a Zayre store.  They were being bled dry by bad credit practices and high shrink.  We were doing fairly well, having digested G.C. Murphy to become a 300 store chain.  The acquisition started Ames on the long downward skid to oblivion, while Zayre Corp, free of it's albatross discount stores, was able to reorganize and do quite nicely as TJX Corp., parent of Marshall's and T.J. Maxx.  It was a shotgun wedding that made absolutely no sense. Peter Hollis had been CEO of both companies and we were left with only speculation as to why he might be throwing a lifeline to his buddies over there.

Likely true - in fact, had Ames been able to (at the end) somehow close a good number of stores and keep only the ones in smaller areas where there was little (or no) competition, they could have kept those running for somewhat longer (maybe even still be open - after all, even with online shopping options, there are still times when you need something now and having stores in close proximity those will get the business). 

One area that always comes to mind is northern parts of NY, where you may now travel an hour or more to find a general merchandise type store, passing 2 or 3 former Ames locations in the process.  I'm sure there were similar areas in other parts of the Northeast that would be equivalent (parts of ME, VT, NH at least fit the same type of criteria).

[TheFugitive]

You have some good ideas here.  Certainly better than any from the suits in Rocky Hill who were pulling down the big bucks to make these decisions.