THE Outsider

A week off the Sherwin-Williams beat helped lower the temperature of the beef I was sharing with the trolls I've attracted on a sub-Reddit for Sherwin-Williams employees since I began investigating wage theft at that company. 

Though they're still serving it well-done.

In an effort to find cost reductions Sherwin-Williams is piloting a new position in the field, that of a Multi-Store Manager who as the name suggests will, “oversee the operations of multiple stores within a designated geographic region.” 

The position will be piloted in Gaithersburg, Maryland and Noblesville, Indiana according to the jobs’ postings on a Sherwin-Williams’ intranet.  The same source who shared screenshots of the posts also shared that the pilot will be running in Washington state and Kanas City as well, with four Multi-Store Managers appointed to manage nine stores. 

So when they ask a Multi-Store manager to handle three locations they won’t have to run another pilot.  

Along with cutting hours for part-timers and leaving open jobs unfilled the pilot is one of several initiatives ongoing at Sherwin-Williams which force employees to produce more in the same hours worked.  The very mechanisms of Sherwin’s wage theft schemes born from these corporate initiatives. 

It would be interesting to learn more details of the pilot, such as how long it will run and what data they’ll collect?  And what data will be determinative on whether or not there is a national rollout of this model? 

Which is of-course what they are piloting. 

Are there plans to collect data from customers impacted by these changes?  Or will Multi-Store Managers authorize overtime to complete the former manager’s work when it cannot be reasonably absorbed into the existing schedule? 

If the answer to those questions is no then all that Sherwin’s testing is whether they can fill that job!

Plus a price increase and Ms. Petz had a busy week which left no time to hand out candy or do her own trick or treating, though she was still spotted throughout the building. 

(taken from Reddit page and not original content)

(Psst, if you have the answer to any of those questions you can let me know here).

What Petz did make the time for was to file a Form 4 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, accepting options to buy 47,630 shares of Sherwin-Williams stock anytime in the next ten-years for $331.37 per share, already in the money at the time she received them.

Though they cost Petz $0 according to the filing. 

It will be up to the market to determine the size of Petz’s windfall, at today’s price already more than $1.5 million though reasonable inflation over ten-years makes $15 million seem more likely.  Those options coming in addition to more than $2.5 million worth of stock Petz was granted in February of this year.

Just two months before cutting her employees 401(k) match. If audacity were a sin that would be Petz’s original. 

And like Adam and Eve there will be no going back for Petz, whose board has shown more patience than the landlord did in Eden did, though others in Cleveland have not been as forgiving according to my sources.

Outside of Cleveland her relationship with store managers also seems irredeemable.  With many credibly accusing her of wage theft, making a pilot program which aims to cull their ranks look more like retaliation than a reasonable effort towards efficiency.