RANTS & RAVES
FedEx is starving a cold called Kinko's
FedEx Kinko's (I refer to it as FEK from here on) is going into the crapper, I suspect, thanks to the manner in which employees are today being squeezed so tight yet expected to offer people-friendly and timely service. I'm over losing my get-along job there (far over it!), but I have friends who work there. Anyone who visits a store, who had visited one this time last year (March 2004 versus 2005), would notice a big difference. I am unkindly amused at FedEx for the delapidated service and the lowered morale of my friends. Where I worked was always been a busy place -- I worked at one of the top ten busiest stores in the country -- but it's gotten even less service-oriented behind the scenes. This is not the staff's goal, but as far as I can see, it's the company leaders' goal. Tighten the payroll, boost profits -- and devil may care if customers aren't impressed.
A few I know are considering other jobs, I believe, and while getting rid of "undedicated" employees may be the goal of FedEx in hyper-streamlining FEK's staffing, I doubt there's a realization, certainly not with regard to the busy stores, just how tough it is, currently, to provide good service. Everyone seems to be working lots of overtime just to keep things functioning, but I presume that paying lots of overtime -- to the point that even "overtime junkies" are tired of it -- was not the goal in Fred Smith's purchase of Kinko's. It cannot be avoided, though, from what I am seeing.
Overtime is costly, where one additional employee could put in a full week's work, there are lone employees earning, with too much overtime being necessary, the equivalent of 15-22.5 regular hours (in other words, 10-15 overtime hours at time & a half, each week) or more. And there's a lot of it going around. It's gotten worse in the nearly four months since I left: morale and service have never been worse at my former store. More than a month after I was canned, I had a freelance project that required lots of FEK output, and spent more time in there than I expected, and I could see the deterioration of service. This wasn't because employees aren't doing their jobs (not in most cases, anyway), but because, as they say, there's no "there" there. These people are tired and overly pressured, certainly for the pay they receive. There's simply too few employees to accomplish everything necessary to keep the lines moving.
It's as if there's a "they can go elsewhere if they don't like it" attitude in the boardroom looking over FEK, and this is obviously not the right model for maximizing the benefit to the purchase of Kinko's, while it'll work the numbers nicely in the short term. This approach, for some customers' opinions, seemed to have started upon the buyout of Kinko's from the private partnership of founder Paul Orfalea and partners, and now it's gone even farther with FedEx's approach. I had hoped that the penny-pinching profit motive would have changed under Fred Smith's guidance. Perhaps he's yet to have much to do with things, though, and the management of FEK itself is boosting outcomes by squeezing quality of service and employee treatment to impress Mr. Smith.
Why the attention seems to be on maximizing profits and not on maximizing profits with employee/customer satisfaction, I cannot understand. Greed, or an entrepreneurial "general-behind the-lines" squandering of the operation to jack up the good numbers at the cost of customer and employee morale, are all I can figure would be what are motivating the changes I have observed.
Perhaps Fred Smith believes shuttling boxes and personalized business/print services can function in the same push-button, move-the-widgets manner, and he's trying to create a staffing parity at FEK to the FedEx operation. It just won't work. It's a sad way to structure a very people-oriented operation. FedEx is about shuttling boxes around, and no matter how good it is, it is just boxes; FEK involves customers much closer to the behind-the-scenes operation than shipping. There's much more interaction between customers and their items, and their items and employees, at FEK. It is not so much an inanimate object being serviced with FEK, there is more hands-on with each order than with shipping, but it seems FedEx is trying to operate FEK by the FedEx model, where customers are not significantly close to the system behind the counter, while at FEK they very much are close to it.
The profits seem to be impressive thus far. So what? It won't last, or it will become a running joke similar to standing in line at the DMV. Business services such as what Kinko's has offered since the 1970's is a hot business. I think FedEx is squandering the lead with their approach. With the way things are, there will be an eager entrepreneur pouncing on the industry, making FEK a forgotten original, similar to Eastern Airlines.
Shuttling boxes is less labor-intensive than the service FEK offers beyond shipping. I'm not sure Fred Smith believes this, or he has been misinformed. Shipping is an impersonal business by contrast to the services FEK offers. The typical guy trying to keep a business going, dropping into FEK, isn't quite expecting to be treated like a box, paying around $1 for color prints and other such premium pricing. But addressing customer expectations and involvement, and respecting Kinko's employees are apparently not the concern today. Squeezing all they can out of FEK seems to be the goal in this new, less prodigious era in the business services company begun humbly -- and with customer service at the forefront of the business -- in the back of a sandwich shop in California.
It is not a sure path to the crapper for FEK, but it's looking rough, and I feel bad for my former coworkers whose morale seem to be very low. No, it is not destined for has-been history, but it deserves to be there if that is what would affect the top-snots of FedEx, since I've seen a load of STUPID shipped in overnight several times during the first year of FEK ownership, including their treatment of me -- but with that said, regardless of that treatment. Especially, I notice the lowered enthusiasm of employees I have known before and after the buyout, and it is clear that FedEx doesn't yet know what it's doing, and the head widgets put in place by the prior owner of Kinko's to manage the FedEx division are thoroughly screwing up things under FedEx ownership.
Well-off? You betcha. Worth betting on? Not to me. FEK is not worth betting on until they start treating all the employees as people, and not boxes.
[Revised March 23, 2005, April 2005; edited for clarity.]