Bleedin’ Out
I hadn’t been sworn to secrecy, but after explaining the situation to my roommates, I only called my closest family and friends. I had been with the company for nearly thirty-eight hundred days and the situation felt insulting. I hadn’t been a great team player in the store for a long time; my heart was elsewhere. I was tired of trying to sell in departments I knew (or cared) so little about. I dreamt of being able to reshape the face of the company. Yet here I was, sitting at home with a nervous present and a cloudy future. I wasn’t bored, though. I took healthy advantage of Kelly’s Netflix account and watched all three Godfather films for the first time ever. Then Fargo. Then the entire series run of Better Off Ted. I even started to write the great American novel, eking out over twelve thousand words. I checked in with store management from time to time, but I spent the next two weeks sleeping until late in the afternoon and being extremely uncomfortable.
Despite the wait, I still felt my odds were good. A few months prior, Brian Maupin – a Best Buy employee out of Kansas City – produced a video mocking iPhone 4 buyers in favor of HTC’s new EVO smartphone. It was fanboy-ish to a T and quickly garnered a national audience when it went viral and received coverage from every major tech site. Once Best Buy found out, they suspended him. Despite the exposure and damage it may have caused fellow employees and a vendor like Apple, Best Buy decided not to fire Maupin. Instead, Maupin quit to chase creative endeavors and, well, no one really knows what happened to him, but he has at least one popular, ire-inspiring video under his belt.
At a point, I was asked some follow-up questions regarding my pictures. The case worker mentioned a photo that Kirk had not. Kirk had only shown me photos taken directly from my public-facing TwitPic account, but the one in question was private, only accessible if you were a friend of mine on Facebook. This immediately made me nervous about my friends, who were mostly Best Buy employees. The picture in question, below, was one of many I shot during one of my trips to corporate. I had sought and was granted permission to take pictures during my visit. This particular shot involved a security checkpoint I had gone through many times, as had many students from nearby schools who came to the campus on field trips. I had no particular rationale for the picture, I just took it. I spent the next two days taking tons of photos in and around campus, even with Vice Presidents around and participating, and never being questioned about it. Because I understood these pictures were related to a very special and confidential project, I kept all of them hidden, so it shocked me when this picture emerged during the investigation.
Another wrinkle in matters that wasn’t readily apparent was the fact that Best Buy had been uploading confidential corporate videos for well over a year at that point, including interviews with executives about future strategies, some real Inside Baseball discussion on how various projects failed, including the previously mentioned Escape concept in Chicago, and a variety of content that would only appeal to the most hardcore Best Buy employees. Also posted? A number of videos highlighting the company’s relationship with Accenture, the consulting agency that at one point (and still may) occupied one of Best Buy’s corporate towers in its entirety, including how Best Buy’s HR process ran through them. I wasn’t sure why this content was available to the public, these videos had between five and thirty views each, but they’ve since been removed.
Finally, it was my time.
My store manager had wanted to wait, but I wasn’t interested in sitting on pins and needles until the end of the work week to learn my fate. We returned to the same room that I had my fateful meeting with Kirk and my manager asked me what I thought. I didn’t have much to say. I still thought I was in the right. Instead, I received two envelopes. The first included a letter stating that my employment with Best Buy was terminated effective immediately for violating the company’s Social Media policy. The second was a check for all those unpaid vacation hours. I jotted down the company’s 1-800 HR number and then stopped thinking about Best Buy for a while.
By the time I thought about following up with Best Buy, I’d already surpassed the company’s Peer Review window, an opportunity in which fellow employees can review the case and, perhaps, offer a revocation of Accenture’s orders, the entity that ultimately decides whether to fire employees. (Bob Willett, who would become the chief of Best Buy’s disastrous international expansion, came from Accenture.) Instead, I got a call center in India and a follow-up from Minnesota in which Accenture determined, on the advice of my former district management, that I was far too much of a security threat. The case was closed, and no further action that could be taken.
Why Now?
As I mentioned about six thousand words ago, I’ve waited a long time to tell this story. I’d enlisted people I knew and pitched them on the story, but would back out for fear of retaliation. I neither signed nor agreed to any confidentiality agreements at any point and word got around the store about my fate soon enough, perhaps not to this kind of detail. I wasted no time when my suspension came, applying for jobs immediately, ultimately taking a lateral move working in a call center for a few dollars more than I had been making. In consulting with legal experts, I quickly understood that if I were to bring this story to light, whether by my hand or someone else’s, it could cause some potential issues with my then-current employer, especially since they worked with Best Buy. I spent years writing this article in my mind before ever committing it to WordPress.
Of course, that didn’t mean I had to write particularly nice things about Best Buy, a company I still feel strongly is operating a dollar short and a day late to be an effective, long-standing organization. Best Buy seems to be the source of many of its own problems, ones I naively believed I could provide ‘big picture’ solutions for. Many of the people I knew during my time at the company, both in the store and at corporate levels, have moved on to new ventures. The company recently announced they would be eliminating a further four hundred jobs at corporate, the first wave of a larger cost-cutting initiative, which comes a year after the company closed one hundred and fifty stores nationwide.
After a relatively short time in the top seat, Brian Dunn, the man I pitched The Escape Plan to directly, resigned his CEO position before a committee discovered he had an inappropriate relationship with a store-level associate. Brian joined the company the year after I was born as a cashier and worked his way up the ladder to become the company’s top executive. Brian was always a nice guy in the years I’ve known him, and I hope that despite his sports fanaticism, he makes room for some big new chapter in his life that washes away the legacy of being that CEO. It’s far too early to retire.
As for me, that call center job let me write a book and position myself in such a way that I could begin pouring all my heart into FleshEatingZipper, a site that will eventually conquer the world. The night I was issued my suspension, I was also asked for the login credentials for both the store’s Facebook and Twitter feeds. A year and a half later, no one has gone so far as to even change the passwords. It would have been far too easy to be malicious, but that would have served no point. Despite the fact that hundreds of Best Buy stores had set up their own social media outlets, the company had them removed, perhaps to simplify the message as none of them were created under any particular template or oversight. Not only is this a lost opportunity for the stores, but Best Buy’s official social media outposts are easily some of the most unimaginative and unengaging communication tools I’ve ever seen, written and maintained like bland marketing copy.
My hope with this piece is that if companies across America could better formulate – or better educate about – their social media policies, then more long-form disciplinary tracks could be established, rather than outright termination. No one should lose their jobs over innocuous tweets or photos, like I did. No one should have to keep their story secret.
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