Wal-Mart rarely has more than 4 registers open for at least the past 10 years. It is the MAIN reason I rarely go there.
They are penny wise and pound foolish. Their cheapskate policies are costing them money.
one of my local Walmart’s has those self-checkout lanes. I refuse to use those things.
Similarly, one of my brothers works in the back office operation of a large financial services company. Over the years, offshoring and cutbacks in personnel have led to a gradual deterioration in the quality of customer service.
As with Wal-Mart, the de facto management strategy my brother sees with his employer is to cut and pare away personnel and costs until service begins to break down, then add back enough to remedy the breakdown.
Such an approach though risks long-term damage to a company's reputation and can cause workforce quality issues. When a wave of new people have to be hired on a rush basis, employee standards tend to be relaxed, leading to new employees who are slow to learn and adapt and troublesome in their conduct.
In addition, management that is mostly intent on cost-cutting tends to miss both new opportunities for growth and the rise of competitive dangers. Moreover, the potential for useful managerial innovations is often missed in the constant scramble for squeezing every possible nickel and dime of costs out of operations.
In effect, the constant corporate struggle to run more cheaply sabotages the prospects for growth through new markets and improvements in operations and service to customers. When stock analysts and investors realize that has occurred, they tend to back away from such a company, realizing that it has abandoned the effort to excel in favor of cost-cutting. Hence Wal-Mart's stock price tumble.