[thinkr42]

I worked at Marsh from 2005-2015 in both corporate and the store. We were always skeptical of Sun, the CEOs that would cycle through didn't grasp the basics of grocery, and as an organization we failed to invest in basic infrastructure that would reduce our overall costs which are huge in the 2% margin grocery business.

At the store we had registers with an OS from the 80's, a common thing if you look around, but we never invested in developing anything beyond the 80's unlike our competitors. We didn't ever implement a JIT style logistics program, which with massive in store staff cuts led to poor merchandise orders which in a perishable business kills you. Management in general was _highly_ skeptical of new technology and prone to spending a bunch of labor hours on repetitive, easily automated tasks (by my accounting at the time, I could have automated more than a million dollars of labor costs with a week of effort - something I brought up with management and demonstrated but was ultimately shot down, I wasn't some super genius - we had folks literally copying and pasting for 8 hours a day).

Marsh was a good company with good people, several of those in the article I knew from my time in corporate. We had folks that would kill themselves working 60 hour weeks to keep a store afloat. It sucks to see what had happened to them.

[sct202]

I wonder how much of that was politicking, where someone was keeping something purposefully bad so that they could sell a solution that "saves so much money" when a far cheaper solution would save as much money and cost way less.

[Spooky23]

Sometimes companies maintain high friction/high cost crap like that to scare off acquisition.

A friend worked for a regional bank that had a strategy of purposeful obsolescence to maintain control with the core shareholders, who were mostly from one family. They were using 1980s era AS/400 systems with terminals as late as 2008, and had only 1 PC assigned to a manager in the branches, with connectivity via ISDN.

[thinkr42]

I hadn't thought of this to be honest, but I do faintly remember the IT / Dev team using the "not technically feasible" line a bunch whenever Marketing would come through with stuff. Used to get me angry quite a bit and I saw it translate a bunch to lost revenue and increased costs.

I don't know how much of this got sent out of Marsh and up to Sun though.

[Spooky23]

Lazy IT people are always a good excuse too. Especially in CFO driven IT shops.

I've seen people waste millions on magical systems that did very little out of inertia. In one case, a system with something $10M in annual costs that managed terminal (as in VT-102 terminal) and line printer assignments. A decade after the printers were trashed and terminals moved to a (almost equally offensive) very expensive web-based system.

[thinkr42]

I saw this a bunch in my next job after Marsh, which was analytics consulting. I'm not sure about Marsh doing this (at least internally), but who knows with Sun.