Carowinds also rolls out layoffs

I get that this sort of thing is common when two large companies merge. But I also worry about the promises the new combined company has made to invest a literal billion dollars to improve their parks while also eliminating park specific management positions and the operational knowledge that goes with those people.

I want to believe that eliminating some full-time positions might free up some money for other improvements. Maybe there are plans we don't know about yet, like ending Winterfest or something, and they won't need as many full-time employees.

Sadly the amusement industry is shrinking with this new company. Time has come for them to make money.

The company needs to do everything that they can to turn a profit and pay off their debt. When looking at KD, if Winterfest didn't turn a profit than there isn't a reason to continue.

Sad for the folks who are losing their jobs, I hate seeing that.

The debt is not that big of a deal. I'm sure they have favorable terms. Businesses take on debt, it's normal.

It is possible that the staffing levels were not appropriate. That seems to happen even to the best businesses over time. Sometimes I can't understand how some need as many people as they do. When I left Microsoft in 2011, they had 100k-ish people. Now it's more than double that. What do all of those people do? It's not a problem unless it negatively impacts the product. Will it? I guess we'll know by mid-summer.

I worked for Cisco over a decade ago and they seem to go through mass layoffs every year, sometimes several. I was part of one in 2013, and all these years later I still occasionally see former coworkers on LinkedIn get cut.

A lot of larger companies do that, all while hiring. I get that not everyone can do every job, but that seems more like churning than trying to control costs.

There’s a corporate philosophy where the “bottom” 10% of the company is cut every year. Was it six sigma?

No, that some Jack Welch bull****, he was a monumental scourge on the business world.

Sometimes its referred to as rank and yank. GE did it when Jack Welch was CEO. Some people argue the same should be done with products a company sells: discontinue the bottom 10% of products that you sell. Idea with both would be continuously improving the business. Often sounds better in theory than works in reality.

I can't think of a visit to a non-Disney or Universal park in the last 15 years where I thought they had even adequate staffing, let alone overstaffed. CP, (no, the good CP) my home park, is noticeably worse year after year.

That's stack ranking, and a lot of companies still do this. Amazon does it, which is another reason it sucks to work there. They're bleeding people because of that and their return to office nonsense. Netflix I think also does it. The problem is that there's no incentive to work with people if their success makes you seem less successful. It's cosmically stupid.

AT&T also did stack ranking for techs and managers. What it did was encourage cheating and fudging of numbers, because everyone just had to be at the top. But the top doesn’t mean you are actually delivering value for the business.

Businesses need to evaluate staffing levels. Both in general and in terms of specific employees. Ideally it would be constantly but that isn't realistic. Some managers are better at it than others. Its subjective to a certain degree. There aren't necessarily bright lines in terms of we didn't need an additional person yesterday but we do today. Sometimes you need to find a different role/group for a given employee. Sometimes they need to find another company. Not always bright lines indicating either.

Places I have seen who use more formulaic means to make staffing decisions often do so because without them, they have found they do nothing. Formulaic approach requires action. Formulaic can also better protect against litigation resulting from staffing decisions. But trying to make the subjective objective by creating lines, cutoffs, etc. can result in arbitrary distinctions (on comp results as well as rankings). But lines need to be drawn somewhere (will have a given number of employees at various levels, given employee will remain with the business or not, etc).

Significant events present opportunities to review staffing. Change in ownership. Economic/industry slowdown. Loss of a major customer. Changes made in those circumstances are often significant but it can be more the case because changes that should have been made years earlier are being made all at once.

Not commenting on Carowinds specifically because I don't have info on the specifics.

But that's just it, it is subjective, even if you're using a stupid formula. As you said, it's arbitrary. You don't "have" to do anything. The stack ranking thing is toxic, counter-productive and emphasizes "visibility" over actually important things like outcomes. I've had no issue firing people over the years who didn't produce the results that were expected. The big companies that do this kind of nonsense generally share one thing in common: They don't trust line managers and/or train them to make good decisions. I've seen it over and over in companies with 300 people to 100,000+.

I don't know if this is what's going on at Cedar Flags, but there's a fair amount of evidence that the folks in the corporate office don't really understand what happens on the midways anymore. The listening leadership was gone when Ouimet left.

The fact that companies like airlines, with notoriously volatile profit margins, are often so loathe to let their people go, while companies with enormous bank accounts and profits like Amazon, Meta, etc. do layoffs like crazy, shows that these layoffs aren’t necessary. Companies aren’t charities, but if places like the ones I mentioned are so trigger-happy with layoffs, I’ve no problem saying that they’re run by terrible people. Why anyone wants to work for people like that, I’ll never understand. Offer buyouts if it’s that important to cut back on staffing. It just shows a blatant disregard for the human cost, and to me, it’s a huge contributing factor to stupid things like hustle culture.

Sorry. I know this is a very emotional post, and I’ve never worked for either of those companies, but I work for a company that didn’t eliminate jobs until the most dire of financial straits hit, and when they did and my job got the axe, another department stepped in and picked me up. A class act by a company that had a legitimate need to cut staff, and proof that people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg behave in a really disgusting manner. Cutting your lowest performers, assuming they’re actually that, at regular intervals is another way of saying that you don’t understand how or are too lazy to develop people into top performers.

The best part is that the same companies tend to think that their recruiting and interviewing processes are amazeballs. If they're so great, then why do you need to nine-box people and let them go?

Jeff:

there's a fair amount of evidence that the folks in the corporate office don't really understand what happens on the midways anymore.

The sadder part of this accurate comment is that there are folks working in Charlotte who used to walk the midways and seemingly totally get it.

Or at one point got it.

And now they forget it.

Do they forget it? Or do the folks above them that never walked the midways not give them the freedom to make any actual decisions? That was often our struggle at WDW. Mandates and policies would come down from folks that had never worked a day in the parks that we were forced to follow, common sense and efficiency be damned.