The new CIO announced on September 23, 2019, that all IT employees will be let go the week before Thanksgiving. Multiple IT departments are being outsourced to HCL Technologies. Last day will be November 22, 2019. This includes Field Technical Support, who service the stores' systems and registers. Hundreds are impacted.
Posted by @11buiY1H-1mms, bumped into a thread for important info.
The new IT people in India are terrible. If they're cheaper to pay, well, you get what you pay for. It would be better to not have any IT than to have these people work.
Field Service was overstaffed. Too many technicians spent too much time beautifying equipment installations that no customer saw, and meant nothing to the bottom line. Had incompetent FTS regional management not burdened field techs with make-work and administrative tasks and focused on only essential tasks, Essintial Technologies wouldn't now be taking their jobs.
Used to work there as part of their mid-level technical support. Rough place - the real boon was in many of the coworkers who I miss working with.
When they introduced the new ticket-and-documentation system, I confided in just a few people that the compulsory rapid-fire creation of detailed troubleshooting articles (many of which were a joke) was the beginning of our self-obsolescence (that is, we were essentially firing ourselves) and that we should keep one eye on the horizon for those dark clouds.
Lo and behold - outsourced/off-shored to India. It was already frustrating for the stores (they hated the Indian password-issues team) so I wonder how it will go now.
Best of luck to all those affected since my departure!
So who is taking bets? I bet as a whole the service will be more expensive and not as good.
This has been confirmed that all of IT will be layed off. These employees will have a hard time finding a new job because the area is already saturated. It seems that companies are choosing to out source to India. These companies like rite aid will not recover over time, the software is to complexed. This transition will take a very long time for the new contractors to understand. This will be Rite Aid’s last chance. In a short while they will also disappear like so many other companies.. another American icon lost to India. It’s a shame.
I feel for the employees who are being laid off, I hope they are all able to get new jobs ASAP.
But this kind of restructuring is desperately needed at Rite Aid. The company’s cost structure has been stuck for a very long time, thanks for the terrible leadership of Crooked Standley.
I would like to see the Rite Aid board claw back the 3 million dollars they gave him as a “retention bonus” and give it to the laid off employees instead. Standley didn’t deserve it and never should have gotten it. Give it to the laid off employees!