Or are they just simply ignorant?!? If you're a MM and you make the mistake of holding court before a group of us for 45 minutes, and all you do during that time is blather on about how we're not doing our jobs according to how the system has been laid out, how we're not managing our time wisely, how we're dropping the ball and the plethora of issues we're facing is 100% our fault, accusing us of actively sabotaging the efforts of the company, "to make our clubs run the best that they ever have", and to stop undermining the decisions of management by complaining about and working against other shifts, throwing our managers and supervisors all under the bus at the same time, you don't deserve the kind of respect your title normally would command. Your ego is out of control and you're not living in the real world, and you sure as sh– have absolutely no idea about what a club requires in order to be maintained at the level you're expecting it should be.
You love your captive audiences, don't you? You love standing up there, beating your chest, using your position like some bully pulpit, rounding up the troops and berating every one of us for the store's horrible performance and terrible situation it finds itself in. Instead of trying to find solutions by asking us for input and attempting to get a clear understanding of what we're up against every day and night, you spend a few hours here and presume that you know all of what is wrong and exactly who to point the finger at. You don't know the first thing about how to encourage, motivate, or lead people. You insult everyone simply by being in the building at all and you make yourself look silly every time you open your mouth. The only reason you occupy the position you currently hold is to fill a quota. You did nothing to earn it other than being who and what you are strictly by conditions you have no control over. You are a walking embarrassment.
You're just a clueless, insecure salesperson for a program that is riddled with remarkable flaws and an abject failure in every measurable way possible. You don't like being put on the spot by anyone and having to explain or defend what those who you answer to have caused. When presented with some of the most glaring issues of our current system, you have no real answers. All you do is defend what has been done by blindly supporting the direction and telling all of us that we're the reason it isn't working. You ignore the facts and trumpet the lies and now everyone knows it. When everyone else stayed silent and let you roll through your silly dissertation, I raised my hand and told you exactly where the problems begin and continued to poke holes in every aspect of the system I was given time to convey. Your response? Nothing. All you said was, "Well, we're going to work on fixing those issues." That's all you said. Maybe you weren't prepared and that's all you could think of. You probably thought this would be like any other situation where no one is going to say anything because I'm the goddamn Market Manager and they're all scared of me. You didn't realize there are still people like me working here and we're not afraid to interact with you and ask questions and share our experiences and concerns. You may have thought that you'd managed to get rid of all of us. You didn't there are still many more like me in this company. We work our tails off and we do our best to fulfill our responsibilities and exceed that which is expected of us. The part that makes us dangerous is that we're capable of critical thinking and that's the part that people like you would rather not have to deal with. There's even a few of us who really aren't concerned about you losing your sh– and firing us because we put you on the spot in a situation you weren't expecting you'd find yourself in, with a dozen other people present. You were most likely upset over the fact that not one person who was there would ever be able to say that I was disrespectful toward you in any way while I was given the floor and said what I had to say. That part really burns you up, doesn't it?
I'll reiterate the same thing I urged you to do a couple of days ago: Take the time to visit every club in the market. Go in dressed in street clothes and don't announce anything ahead of time, grab a cart like you're a regular member who is simply shopping, and walk every club. Observe, take notes and pictures. You owe it to yourself to gain a clear understanding of what every club is dealing with while you isolate yourself doing other things. Because what you see in this club right here, is going on in every club, on some level. We may not be in the best place, but we are far from the worst, and the longer this situation is allowed to continue the way it's laid out, it will eventually collapse.