Obsessive emphasis on activity rather than quality & results.
Rapidly losing sight of what made the company great. Customers used to recognize strength in Grainger's employees, products and service. They were ok with paying slightly higher prices for the benefits & reliability.
Grainger is eliminating their experienced workforce at alarming rates in all departments, leaving inadequately trained folks in their place, who are forced to follow awkward robotic scripts without knowledgeable support. Restructuring is understandable and sometimes a necessary pill in the name of progress. But the vibrant crossfunctional environment that promoted rapid learning for newbies is disappearing as well.
At a time when virtual teamwork through technology has never been easier & the hallmark of progressive corporations, Grainger is centralizing like it's 1990, in order to trim the herd of tenure. Callcenters & offshoring all your support looks alot like a cable company in motion. They are dissappearing rapidly--perhaps there's a lesson there.
Product offering, while exploding in SKUs, is being diluted in quality, support, & inventory (especially locally). At same time, price difference vs competition has grown to embarrassing degree.
In modern era, customers can shop in seconds what used to take hours, rendering value proposition no longer relevant. Average customer no longer willing to pay 40-50% more when the strength of a once great corporation is not behind it. That's hard to justify & even harder to sell.
Good luck with your fully integrated national accounts who rarely need to speak to humans...soon they will be the only customers left.
