SP hoped to pick the bones of a dieing Staples. They brought zero innovation or change, not because they had no ideas (they didn't) but because that wasn't there intent. Rescuing Staples was always too much work.
The last best chance might have been long before SP got involved.
Back in 2012 Staples.com was the number 2 online retailer in the world. AMAZON was of course number one... imagine if someone, anyone had just a glimmer of insight and took that potential to the max.
That was the last moment for Staples. Now it's just a long slow painful death. Every product line is just a reminder of another retailer that does it better.
SP will s— it dry and leave it behind, but even SP may suffer hardship trying to unload this useless carcass.
3 replies (most recent on top)
Yes, and when JD asked us all to be brand ambassadors and give coupons to B2B customers? That had the whiff of desperation for sure.
Probably the reason former Amazon people landed at Staples was because Amazon moved them out for a reason. To your point there are a lot of reasons why Staples declined and SP certainly hasn't helped but that is like blaming the vulture for feeding off a corpse. The vulture didn't k–l it, it was already dead. That is what vultures do. I will however always miss the Friday SG blog. Shaming people for not buying overpriced TP and Paper Towels from Staples will always be a classic.
Staples.com was never the #2 website in the world. Some magazine issued a flawed ranking (flawed because, as an example, it did not combine Apple's online sales - iTunes, the app store and regular hardware sales - into one Apple ranking). It also aggregated all of Staples' online sales (SBA and Quill), which is somewhat problematic since SBA is a closed website that the public did not have access to. In any event, SPLS was never even a top five etailer. Later on leadership decided to dramatically expand the SKU count available on STaples.com, without of course adding tools (such as "Best Seller") to help users navigate through thousands of products. Funny how it had all these folks with Amazon experience but couldn't offer what Amazon was offering... And it did not advertise the expanded SKU base (Staples has everything your business needs to succeed)! Now that was a failure.