Shares for Office Depot and Staples were falling hard and fast after the New York Post reported that the companies’ deal could fall apart.
Citing an unnamed source, the Post said a top official from the Federal Trade Commission — the agency tasked with approving or denying the deal — put a Post-it on the record of the file for the acquisition that said “No deal.”
The story says Staples’ acquisition of Boca Raton-based Office Depot is valued at $11.3 billion, not $6.3 billion, as was widely reported, and has “hit a wall” with FTC Bureau of Competition head Deborah Feinstein, its source said.
Stocks for both companies fell quickly after the news broke.
Is the Staples-Office Depot deal dead? Shares fall hard and fast
It would serve the USPS right to have these deals fail for trying to take away work from clerks. Management is so incompetent it’s ridiculous.
I would wager most offices are getting the living shit harassed out of them now, referring to city letter carriers over DOIS office time projections. The fact is that DOIS is not the wonderful crystal ball management thinks it is. It can’t be because mail doesn’t get counted correctly or fairly in many offices, the carrier’s office casing time can be cooked to suit their needs just by shorting the volume count on a day when you’re getting an office count. Parcels can be overlooked, and usually are.
There is no excuse for management thinking a very slow goof off who barely makes 18 and 8 is doing their job if their office time is met, and think somebody who cases a lot faster is somehow worse because they are actually being bullied to work even faster while the dog carrier continues to work lots of overtime for doing a third less amounts of delivery. The fact is, most management doesn’t really know how to properly evaluate anybody. They rely on DOIS with bad figures, deliberately false input, and whatever else they can come up with and think it’s a fair tool for telling whether a carrier is doing their work or not.
We get chewed out for being a little earlier than expected in the PM, and instead of them saying “good work”, they think you’re a problem carrier because you didn’t come back and go directly to emptying your trays at exactly five minutes to clock out time and match their precious figures.
Years ago before DOIS, management was happy if you ran your route in eight hours, and didn’t care about the office time/street time differential. After all, the pay was the same, and if you were justified in your overtime, so be it.
Now you can’t allow weather, traffic, vehicle breakdowns, route maintenance or anything besides straight delivery. Well, tough shit. If you ever carried mail for any length of time you’d know better, but I know enough people who did carry and went into management and quickly turned on their former craft buddies, even though they knew the carriers were right.
It’s true management can’t discipline based on DOIS by itself, but they will try to add something to it if they get enough pressure from higher up. The NALC should be much more aggressive in the harassment of carriers over such an unfair program, and address it at the next contract negotiations. Locals should fight the bullying too. I’m getting older, move slower and can’t help that fact. Still I can out case and deliver probably two thirds of the carriers in my office, but they fuck with my numbers so I’ll go and case like a bat out of hell. Meanwhile, Slow Poke moves along at the speed of evolution and because he “meets” his numbers, they think he’s doing just fine. Even though I have a much larger route and on most days get back on time, while he is never on time, regardless of volume, but they turn the other cheek. Shows you how fair the system is.
This would be great news!
It’s actually of little relevance 2 USPS or their employees. Staples is overwhelmingly a small office machine and office supplies outlet. If u so much as stepped-foot into a Staples store,at least in NYC,u would notice that their is very little sales promotion of USPS products or services. Perhaps,our postal unions,especially the APWU National,was even duped by the last PMG Donahue;into making the Boycott Staples campaign the foremost issue during the past two-years? Has the much more importanT issues of plant-closures/consolidations really vanished into thin air after the Queens,NY was it’s sole victim in USPS latest round? One is naive,at their own peril.