Hi – my computer died earlier this week, and the only existing backup was over three months old, so my spreadsheet of what I had posted and what I had not yet posted is gone. This one may be a duplicate, so my apologies in advance if it is. Also, it’s kinda long, so a lot of it will be below the fold.
So – In the 80’s, I worked for Marshall Field and Company (the famous Department Store) in the Dallas Galleria location.
At that time, Marshall Field was a purveyor of high-end merchandise and clothing, providing boutique lines of merchandise and superior customer service.
However, Marshall Field was sold by BATUS to Dayton-Hudson, which also owned Target.
That’s when the fun began.
Our new corporate overlords determined that we would benefit by carrying the low and mid-priced goods already being purchased by the Target buyers.
Good idea, on paper, but it killed the company.
I dunno, maybe that was their intention, although it seems mightily like driving a Rolls-Royce into a concrete lane divider to make it more like a compact car.
In any case, the upper-middle and upper-class patrons quit buying, and quit coming. They went to Neimann-Marcus (which, unlike Marshall Fields, is still around, BTW) to get the goods they wanted. If they had wanted to shop at a Target or a Dayton’s, why drive to the Galleria?
The stores outside of home base Illinois closed, one by one, including the Dallas Galleria.
And I lost my job.
I did get a severance package that allowed me to take three months for a job search, at least.
Macy’s swooped in, picked the bones clean, and finally killed the tottering animated corpse in 2006, completing the destruction of a legendary department store that had existed since 1881.
My computer skills (self-taught when at Marshall Fields and A.C. Nielsen) allowed me to get a job in phone tech support for GTE. One day they outsourced the entire level 3 (top level) helpdesk.
One of my favourite authors once wrote “If a little black box puts you out of work, find a job building little black boxes.”
(more below the fold)
Continue reading “Today on Tommy T’s Random Ruminations – “A sale of two shitties” edition”
