Mervyn’s Employees Bankrupt?
I’m a subscriber to BusinessWeek, and I read this article, and I found this article on the closing and liquidation of Mervyns pretty interesting.
I definitely agree that Private Equity wasn’t good to Mervyns, but I also agree with Rick Wartzman in his article “What Drucker Would Say About Mervyns” I think the gist of Wartzman’s article is that Mervyns failed to change in the face of a changing retail landscape, and they died. It goes along with another axiom I learned while at Cal Poly: “Change or Die.”
But I took strong issue with page 4 of that article. Sounds to me like a giant pity party for all the workers of Mervyns who are currently unemployed. While I agree that times are tough, and the job market is pretty ugly (heck, I was unemployed for three months myself), I don’t agree with the approach that Emily Thornton took when writing the article. She makes it sound like these “veterans” with 28 years of experience are now going bankrupt because of Mervyn’s closing. I disagree.
They’re going bankrupt and having to tighten their belts because of poor financial planning. In this economy, everyone is facing hard times. But people with decades of experience should have been planning and saving for tough times. Since they clearly haven’t, it seems hardly reasonable to blame their financial trouble solely on Mervyns. They, too, need to take responsibility. They should be out there looking for new jobs. With that much experience, they shouldn’t find it too difficult to land new jobs.
Quite ridiculous if you ask me…