You Won’t Believe How Sears Told 300 Toronto Employees They Were Being Let Go

Yahoo ran an interesting article yesterday highlighting how Sears Canada broke the news to 300 employees that they no longer had jobs.
You Won't Believe How Sears Told 300 Toronto Employees They Were Being Let Go
Yahoo ran an interesting article yesterday highlighting how Sears Canada broke the news to 300 employees that they no longer had jobs.

Yahoo ran an interesting article yesterday highlighting how Sears Canada broke the news to 300 employees that they no longer had jobs.

Here’s a recap of the Yahoo story on how it all went down:

On June 21st, staff at Sears Canada headquarters in Toronto were invited to two separate meetings (all information was divulged by a previous employee).  The two meetings were scheduled at 7:45 and 8:15, one meeting held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, and the other one held at the Fairmont Royal York.

At first, employees didn’t think anything of it; it was a mandatory company-wide meeting, it had happened before and wasn’t usually a big deal.

The Yahoo article states that 300 Sears employees were assembled in a Convention Centre meeting room and as they got there, their company phones and electronics were disabled. After the group was assembled, Sears Canada Chief Operations Officer Becky Penrice got up to speak to the employees.

The entire speech lasted for “about five minutes” and she told the crowd that “…as of today, we are terminated.” Immediately after the speech, Sears took each employee’s badges and company phone.

Employees were not told how they would be compensated for their job loss and again, according to Yahoo, one source said: “We got a generic package saying personalized letters would be sent to us along with our belongings at our desks.”

With some employees working for the company for as much as 35 years, the news wasn’t all that surprising, but devastating nonetheless.

While big companies have never been good at firing large groups of people (ahem, Future Shop), you would have thought that someone might have had a better plan considering it was pretty evident that Sears operations could not be sustained.