I had a great conversation with a store clerk in Victoria today. She works at a local beauty-supply company, and I was telling her that I had just read about the company in a local magazine.
She said that there had been a few articles recently, and was telling me that the best interview she can remember went something like this (I’m paraphrasing her paraphrasing):
Reporter: now that CompanyX has reached this level of success, what’s next?
Owner: we’re downsizing!
She and I shared a great laugh at that. Most people would think that the natural course of a company is that once it starts gaining popularity and growing in production that it should also grow in size. This company has taken the opposite approach though, by keeping things simple. In doing so, they’ve actually managed to streamline their operations and eliminate a few positions.
While it’s sad that we’re talking about actual job losses here, it’s awesome that this company hasn’t just followed the normal course and started a hiring spree with it’s new found capital gains.
It’s no secret that we’re in a bit of an economic slump. If you can streamline operations while diversifying, or at least, growing your business, you’re headed in a great direction. Nothing beats a solid success story during a downturn.
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Economic slump? That sucks. Lethbridge just posted its lowest unemployment rates in 20 years.
Roughly 2%.
Unemployment rate generally isn’t used as an indicator of boom/recession — that’s usually the job of a country’s GDP.
It’s promissong that there is such a low unemployment rate, but if everyone is working at Walmart for $6 bucks an hour, that’s hardly a booming economy.
Of course, hardly any of the workers in Lethbridge work at Wal-Mart.
Even so, according to StatsCan, our GDP keeps going up. In fact, we’re 5% higher this year than we were last year as a country.
I remember reading an article about the eMachines/Gateway merger a few years ago. At the time, Gateway had 7,500 employees (down from a peak of 19,000) and eMachines who was the fifth largest seller of computers in the US that year had 138.
If you haven’t come across this yet, you might find it interesting: http://www.smallgiantsbook.com/