On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 10:04:28 +0100, ":::Jerry::::"
wrote:


"Andy Hall" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 09:14:42 +0100, ":::Jerry::::"
wrote:


"Grunff" wrote in message
...
Tony Bryer wrote:


You're assuming that their existing facility just rots. It would
be very surprising if it wasn't taken over by some other business
who would presumably employ a similar number of people.


AIUI their Yeovil site will be used as their head office.


And thus a completely different employment requirement.


So?

Life's tough. They aren't in business to provide employment.


In some ways you are quite wrong, they can't be in business if they don't
(considering they are hardly in the 'one man band' league), and ****e
employers (or those that are perceived as such) never get the best people
for the job IYSWIM.

I don't know whether they are a ****e employer or not. Up until the
recent debacle, I have always found them to give good service.
We have periodically had people here complaining about deliveries that
weren't the next day, although many of these were where people had
gone for the free delivery which is a best efforts affair anyway.

Screwfix and B&Q have become the leading suppliers in their fields in
the UK and B&Q is no. 3 in the world. That isn't achieved or
maintained by not running a business reasonably properly.

A warehousing business probably doesn't need good people (apart from
at management level) but people that are good enough to get the job
done.

Do customers really care about what Screwfix does with their employees
who are made redundant? Not really. It happens every day and may
make the news for a short time but is then rapidly forgotten.

Do shareholders care? Remember that it is quite likely that people
with pension and other savings schemes are quite likely to have
Kingfisher shares in the portfolio. Answer no, as long as it
remains a good investment.



If they wanted to up stick (which I still recon was their end goal, for
distribution reasons) they should have been open about it and not try and
blame local planning regs etc.

At the end of the day it doesn't really matter because the impact of
the loss of 500 jobs in Yeovil is not going to have any long term
effect on SF's business anyway, either financially or by customer
retention. One or two people might not buy from them for a while,
but that's it.

In that scenario I see no reason at all why they would need to go
through an elaborate charade of blaming it on the local authority.
All that that achieves is to raise the profile of the whole issue and
make people wonder. Plus it costs money to have plans put together,
go through all the bureaucracy etc. It's much easier to simply
announce that they are closing one facility and opening another. The
public interest in that would have lasted 10 minutes,.
If the motivation was to move anyway, the latter would have been the
obvious course of action.




..andy

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