Wild to think his end game was going to be that novelty Kona chopper from years ago. Someone drop him this CL listing:
Kona Hot Rod Bike Chopper bicycle Project - bicycles - by owner - bike sale - craigslist
Omg I want this. I would 100% ride it around town.
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fourth or fifth
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How is the Ti bonded to the sleeve? I assume that’s steel?
the quotes at the end with the employees whining about Patagonia “selling out to mother Earth” make the employees seem pretty stupid. every other company sells out to shareholders.
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The word I heard is that they also offered an extremely generous severance package and that the department was bloated to begin with… and that the relocation fits with company sustainability goals. So like….whatever.
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Didn’t want to say it last night but yeah that all sounds pretty generous, esp. for customer service work.
much more sustainable to have CX employees working remotely, and baselining national CoL on Reno isn’t realistic if you have required physical operations in other locales
“Unfortunately, a California-based hub would not meet the criteria we set for a sustainable CX model,” Kenna told BI, confirming that the cost of living and other business needs contributed to the decision.
“The reality is that our CX team has been running at 200% to 300% overstaffed for much of this year,” she added. “While we hoped to reach the needed staffing levels through attrition, those numbers were very low, and retention remained high.”
this is a cost and staff reduction measure couched in ‘team culture’
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if they’re flying people in multiple times a year for team building and training I’d imagine it’s more sustainable to have them live locally
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post can’t be empty
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how important is that though?
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Being able to handle physical samples of products seems pretty important to support them.
A friend used to work at P$ Reno so I’ll probably get more gossip.
I’m no expert but major distribution retail seems impossible to be sustainable. Having a few corporate owned stores and a few distribution warehouses for online is the way. This is a doomer tangent/rant and I apologize for it.
Last week I walked into a dicks sporting goods, a public lands, and a cabelas. They’re massive stores and were empty of customers, maybe a dozen customers total. Each store had an entire wall full of yetis in every color imaginable, and the former two also had an entire corner dedicated to stanleys. Maybe I’m out of touch but no one is buying these things! And then what happens to the unsold merchandise when v2 comes out?
Same with the shelves of patagonia clothing. Retail’s glut problem is driven by a need to demonstrate consumer choice–creating emissions and landfill waste. Someone here said it best: “imagine everything you see at a walmart ending up in a landfill in just a few years”. Plus we’re all complicit because if you don’t hold index ETF funds and enable this lunacy you literally can’t retire.
Anyway retail seems pretty messed up these days
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This Fresh Air episode is relevant to this conversation about stupid retail.
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Patagonia’s in store experience is pretty important to their brand, having stores in relevant locations to outdoor recreation with knowledgeable staff and sufficient inventory. they don’t carry everything in store but most of the items someone might stop in for in that place— thinking about how the selection differs in the Hawaii stores va the Portland store for example. you can’t move those people but you can move the back of house functions like distribution, returns, and repairs to cheaper places than Ventura, especially since the head office reportedly still has an onsite policy and amenities like daycare to accommodate. cx teams however are fully remote at many similar companies
Clothing is hard too because if you don’t let people try items on it’ll be even more wasteful with returns.
Agreed this is cost-cutting measure in disguise. With the state of retail they likely needed to do something
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Most of the huge players are buying stuff at a significant discount because the product life cycle is in play. From what my friend at REI said the vast majority of their inventory is essentially purchased at closeout pricing from the vendors. I would be shock to hear that Cabelas and the rest are not doing the same.
Buy well below “wholesale”
Sell xx% at MSRP
Sell xx% at Closeout
Turn a profit.
This also ties in to places like Cabelas and Rei being “destination” shopping experiences so the vast majority of customers that walk in the door are there to spend money. Back in 2015 the average non-member REI purchase was $100. Average member purchase was more than that. That stacks up pretty quick when the foot traffic is flowing. I don’t think I have ever walked into the REI near me and NOT seen at least three dozen customer milling around.
These third party retailers that are starting to pop up to sell off returns from Amazon and others are even more wild. We have one coming into Richmond shortly.
The tiered wholesale structure is wild.
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Oh no we didn’t make people hate their jobs enough
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“The severance package was generous, the worker said, but it was sad to see a company they had believed in “fall to the Walmart level.””
Yeah, Walmart, famous for their generous severance packages for low-level customer facing employees. Spoken like someone who has never actually worked for a genuinely exploitative retail business.
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