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Despite what Wall Street thinks, layoffs are almost always the sign of a poorly run company, especially when they do it multiple years in a row, and really especially when they do it during good economic years.

Data from the last 40 years, when layoffs started becoming commonplace, show that companies who lay off in multiple years, especially at the end of the year, see two things happen: their stock price goes up, and they are out of business within 10 years after starting the practice.

These numbers are just averages, but play the odds if you invest in stocks: don't buy stocks of companies that lay people off, just as you wouldn't bet on an NFL team that fires its coach every other year.

The shit they sell is available everywhere too. You can go on Home Depot and Target websites and find the same garbage furniture. It’s also not easy to put together and requires tools not provided in the box. At least IKEA tries to be sustainable and their furniture is easy to assemble.

This is definitely a warning sign that it will. When your sales are down, and you are incompetent as a CEO, blame the workers, because that's never worked before in history.

A good CEO would be asking themselves, "what am I doing wrong that I need to fix? Where do I need to change?" Not, "I'm fine, employees just need to work harder and spend more of their finite lifetime on my success."

Edit because I want to expand on this a bit: What this CEO is doing is not based on metrics, so therefore doomed to fail. There are no metrics that would lead the company to say 'our workers are lazy, so we need them to not be lazy'.

There are productivity metrics, etc, but - and it's a big 'but' - if those metrics were accurate, they would show specific workers or bottlenecks in your company. If you, as a company, had reliable metrics that stated 'all of our workers are lazy' would you really be trying to keep them on, and just get them to 'not be lazy'? Of course not. This CEO is a fool who lives in a protective bubble.

The metrics they should be looking at: 'what's selling? what's not selling? What is our competition (you know, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target and Costco) selling, because some of them are reporting great revenue numbers (like Costco this week just announced a fucking $15+ dividend and their stock shot up over almost 18% in the last quarter) doing? What are they (our competion) doing that we're not? Where are they weak that we can exploit?

If we don't know, why not? How do we find out?

NOT: "Our workers are just lazy, crack the whip."

Final Edit But This Should Have Been A Blog Post: What this CEO, Niraj Shah, is saying is "my plan is good, the employees just need to execute harder" when in reality he should have metrics to figure out if his plan is actually good since it's underperforming WayFair's competitors and determining if they should change direction. A critical part of the CEO's job is trying to predict the future and steer the company in that direction. When your prediction and plan fail to deliver, you'd better re-assess and quickly change course to adapt. The likelihood that his plan for 2023 was better than his competitors but somehow his employees just didn't execute is indicative of multiple systemic problems that are all his responsibility: If your plan wasn't being executed, why did you not know until the end of the fiscal year? If your employees are the problem, what is the flaw in your hiring and ongoing management? Are your metrics focused on 'butts in chairs' instead of actual productivity metrics? Is your own management circle reporting correct numbers to you? Do they know what they are doing? Is your competitors' plan working better than yours, and if so, how in the world woud 'executing harder' make a difference?

It will.

I'll paraphrase it a little more clearly:

"To all my best workers that have the highest skills and therefor the most job mobility: Now is the time for you to exit to a better organization leaving behind those that don't have the same options, opportunity, or ambition you do. While we'll not notice your departure for a few months because of inertia of the good systems you've put in place, rest assured when things start breaking or getting lost and we have no one left who knows how to solve these problems we'll scratch our heads how this all came to be while you're gainfully employed at a better organization with more pay and benefits not thinking about us at all."

Even when I got paid overtime to work holiday hours during open enrollment it was not really worth the money. I'd come in at 6:00 am and work until 8 or 9 pm. I made really good money, but I had no life at all, and I could barely feed myself once I got home and crawl into bed to do it all again the next day. Money isn't the only motivator, and people aren't robots - we have a need for a break from the insanity now and then.

Yeah because you'll die chained to your desk and leave a bloated unhappy corpse behind.

It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and ~~Initech~~ Wayfair ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation?

And it isn't just monetary raises that are needed to motivate employees it also takes giving them positive feedback, making them feel valuable, letting the indians have a say instead of just the chiefs all the time. A few rewards and kind words here and there can really make people want to work harder.

I doubt it though. From my own experience I've seen how people who swore they'd never be as douchebaggy as the ones higher up instantly became that once they got paid more and moved up the ladder. I'm all for people getting more money but what I'd really like to see is those who are higher up doing some actual work to earn theirs.

You missed the part where the boss fires those who don't comply.

"Want to" isn't a natural language statement, it's a bullying one as in "You want to do this, or else, RIGHT!?"