Working at Jo-Ann's: Real-World Graduate School

Working at Jo-Ann Fabrics—A Real-World Graduate Degree

Submitted to OpEd News on 4/3/14

Conventional—mainstream—traditional wisdom argues that the personal perspective of a writer has no place in a news story. But in a world where I’ve been down so long it looks like up to me—in a world ruled by people who wield concepts like sabers, I must tell the truth and shame the devil.

When I fled academia because I finally had to admit that my willing embrace of a fantasy both paid my mortgage and guaranteed that students who had studied with me would be working minimum wage jobs after graduation as they searched for stardom—I’d been a theatre professor, after all—when I woke up with a grand hangover after over twenty years teaching acting, I was still addicted to life as myth. I still thought that my belief in a fanciful reality could make it real both to myself and to others with whom I spoke. In other words, leaving academics had not completely cured me of my taste for fantasy.

A case in point: who else but a theatre professor would imagine that she could have a good time working as a sales clerk for Jo-Ann Fabrics? But that is exactly what I convinced myself I could do. In retrospect, I now think of it as both research and a form of penance. I experienced first-hand what students working minimum-wage jobs are likely to encounter after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in a field that offers no paying jobs. I have come to think of my year with this company as a kind of graduate school in which I came to better understand how many, many people in our country are forced to spend their working hours.

In March of 2013, wearing my friendliest smile, I walked into the local Jo-Ann Fabrics store, identified the most mature, knowledgeable-looking woman on the sales floor, and asked if she would take a look at the samples of sewn, knitted and embroidered pieces I’d brought in for her to see. 

Though she seemed the most likely candidate for store manager, and though she admired the tailored jacket, knitted pullover, and needlepoint pillow I’d brought in to demonstrate my handiwork skills, she told me two things that—if I’d really been listening, I would have considered very deeply. One, she was not the store manager. The twenty-one year old who looked frazzled and uncertain was, as the older woman termed it, “manager of the day.” MOD, they call them at Jo-Ann’s. And two, applications for sales positions are not filled out in the store; they are filled out on line using the Jo-Ann Corporate website. I thanked this friendly woman who had steered me right, and then went home to apply for a sales position at Jo-Ann’s using their on-line site.

You see, when I was twenty-one I’d worked for a fabric store and really enjoyed the experience. At loose ends, and needing a little extra income before my retirement kicked in, I thought I’d amuse myself by working part-time at a fabric store in 2014.

I had no idea how much retail had changed. But, because the store manager did hire me, I spent the next twelve months learning exactly how selling fabric to American women had embraced the most ruthless of corporate strategies. I soon experienced how things had changed since 1978.

So What’s Jo-Ann Fabrics?

According to Yahoo Finance, “Jo-Ann Stores has the fabric store market all sewn up. It's the #1 fabric retailer (ahead of Hancock Fabrics) nationwide, operating more than 800 stores in 49 states. The company sells a variety of fabrics and sewing supplies, craft materials, frames, home decorations, artificial floral items, and seasonal goods. Most of its small-format stores (averaging 15,000 sq. ft.) are located in strip mall shopping centers and operate under the Jo-Ann Fabrics and Craft name. The company also operates large-format Jo-Ann superstores (36,000 sq. ft. on average) and an e-commerce site, Joann.com. The company is owned by acquisitive private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners.” http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/10/10543.html.

I’ll return later to the connection between Jo-Ann Fabrics and Leonard Green & Partners.

Hoover’s company profile of this corporation notes that Jo-Ann Stores is rated #202 on the Forbes list of privately held companies. http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/company-profile.Jo-Ann_Stores_Inc.4d1d1e6ac673f41b.html.

Gale Directory of Company Histories reports that Jo-Ann Stores sold more than $2 billion in recent years. Its nearest competitor sells only half as much merchandise, and owns less than half the number of stores of Jo-Ann’s empire.

Sounds like a pretty profitable business. You’d think that would be reflected in the way it treated its employees, its customers, and how it maintained its facilities. Unfortunately, all that profit seems to be going to top management salaries and to the relentless pace of expansion the corporation demands of itself. With over 800 stores in 48 states now, Jo-Ann is still expanding.

Who runs this fabric and craft empire?

The first store in this chain’s history was founded by two immigrant German families, the Rohrbach’s and the Reich’s. A cool bit of history that the current corporation does not mention in its promotions literature has to do with how ran and provided continuity to the earliest version of this company. When the company’s founder, Berthold Rohrbach, died in 1943, the same year he and the Reich’s founded the company,

[His] 30-year-old daughter, Alma Zimmerman, went to work full-time at the store with Hilda Reich. Hilda's daughter, Betty, joined the family business in 1947, and she and Alma opened the chain's second store in Cleveland soon thereafter.

http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/company-profile.Jo-Ann_Stores_Inc.4d1d1e6ac673f41b.html.

Women oversaw the earliest versions of this store. You’d never know it from today’s list of upper management at Jo-Ann’s:

Chairman and CEO: Darrell D. Webb (He earned a little less than $800,000 in 2012.)

President and CEO: Travis Smith

Executive Vice President and CFO: James C. Kerr

Tom Williams to EVP, Operations and Human Resources

Wait for it. Upper management has recently added a woman to its ranks: Riddianne Kline as Executive Vice President, Marketing and Merchandising.

This little group decides how to implement the will of its Board of Directors, a group of executives dominated by Jo-Ann’s owner, Leonard Green and Partners, L.P.

One of Leonard Green’s founders is Jonathan D. Sokoloff, famous—or infamous, depending on one’s point of view—for his connection to Wall Street’s Drexel Burnham Lambert and its convicted junk-bond trader Michael R. Milken. Leonard Green and Partners looked at the financial crash of the 1990’s as opportunity. The New York Times quotes Sokoloff as saying, “What we learned at Drexel underpins our investment philosophy: Protect your downside and don’t lose money.” Or as Milkin was known to say, “[I]nvest in times of chaos and harvest in times or prosperity.”  What most Jo-Ann employees don’t realize is that their company actually exists to put money into Leonard Green and Partners accounts. Men like Sokoloff earn 20% of any profits made from Leonard Green funds’ gains. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/treasure-hunters-of-the-financial-crisis.html?_r=0.

Corporate designs crafted by men like Sokoloff, and put into action by men like Darrell Webb, eventually trickle down to create the miserable work environment endured by many Jo-Ann employees. So while business writers may praise Jo-Ann’s profitability, they either do not understand or do not care how the retailer’s approach is based on squeezing people until they have no more to give.

This profitable corporation employs 23,000 people, most of whom earn a minimum wage. The company is famous for keeping employees, who sometimes work for the company for years, at basically the same salary they commanded when they first started.

The stores expect the sales staff to mop floors, unload stock trucks, and get new merchandise onto the floor within 24 hours—even during the holiday rush period when over 300 boxes may arrive at the back door in a single morning.

When I worked for the company, the store had its floors professionally cleaned maybe once every two weeks, even in the sloppiest weeks of winter. The store used a contract company whose workers were beautiful, but clearly exhausted, Russian women who spoke not a word of English. They were managed by a Russian man who also spoke no English. About an hour after the Russian crew arrived, a man—who spoke English just fine—would call the store to tersely inquire if the cleaning crew was doing a satisfactory job. Apparently, he was the ultimate manager of the Russians, though we never saw him. One word from a Jo-Ann’s manager could get a member of the cleaning crew fired—and they had no opportunity to answer complaints about their work before they were shown the door. They arrived thirty minutes after the store closed, so customers never saw the crew hired to clean the store’s floors. After I met them, I realized that there were still worse examples of American business to fear and avoid.

Though sales associates were not expected to clean the public and/or employee bathrooms, managers had to do so. The break-room was rarely cleaned. The stockroom’s floor had not been cleaned for what looked like years.

The tasks required in the store expose workers to physical strain, workplace chemicals such as formaldehyde on the fabrics, particulates and dust from the cut fabric and craft handling. Employees, myself included, were expected to climb aluminum ladders to stock heavy bolts of fabric on shelves set high on store walls. I actually took to asking customers to page my ladder when I had to climb up to reach a bolt of fleece fabric. At least with their weight on a bottom rung, I had a better chance of keeping the ladder steady as I reached sideways to pull the bolt off the tightly packed shelf.

The culture of the company is such that those women who jump corporate hoops and attain the level of assistant manager or manager, if they are full-time and salaried, are expected to work well beyond forty hours each week without complaint. Their punishing work schedules make it impossible for them to hear concerns or complaints of their part-time workers with anything but indifference or a sense of helplessness. At least part-timers—and they are the vast majority of Jo-Ann’s employees—endure this difficult work situation for a limited number of hours each week. And if part-timers complain in any way, the manager suddenly discovers that she just can’t give that employee as many hours during the next pay period.

The culture of the company is also such that sales associates, called Team Members, see the misery the manager must endure and support her decisions even when they bring physical or economic hardship to them. The team members also come to see each other’s difficulties, and when the corporation institutes yet another policy that makes their life unpleasant, they commiserate with each other, and watch out for each other—but they do not complain.

While I worked for this company, in spite of the fact that our store was meeting the sales expectations set by corporate offices in Ohio, the manager was ordered to cut the number of hours she scheduled each week even as she was encouraged to hire additional staff. The result was that employees, some of whom had worked for the store for years, found their hours cut even as they were asked to train new workers. Additionally, workers who had been stocking shelves at 6 a.m. for years were told in January 2014 that the stocking work would now begin at 4 a.m. Some of the women who did this work were in their 50’s and 60’s. All of these changes reveal the corporation’s way of increasing demands on workers so that new stores can be opened, and the losses of some of the stores offset by squeezing the stores that are doing well. It was at this point in my time at the store that I decided I had been there long enough.  

Never do sales associates hear that a corporation worried about its bottom line is cutting management salaries at the same time that it is asking its sales associates to make do with fewer hours.

The salaries at Jo-Ann’s are so awful that many women working there, especially if they are the sole supporters of their family, have to hold two or three part-time jobs in order to survive.

So why did these women continue to work there? Why did I work there for a whole year?

Those questions are best answered by the truly wonderful part of the people connected to this business: the women on the floor and the customers who regularly shop there. I don’t think most Americans really understand how many women in this country can sew and make beautiful things. These women are not forced to buy clothes or home décor items ready-made. They are able to craft these complex things for themselves. The problem is that companies like Jo-Ann’s are, as Yahoo put it, “sewing up” the fabric and craft markets in this country. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find locally-owned, profitable fabric and craft stores. So if you really love to sew and craft and want to work in that industry, companies like Jo-Ann’s are often the only option.

The hiring policy: find women whose motto is, “I’m just glad I have a job.”

I started this article by confessing how my predilection for fantasy led me to work at this store. I wasn’t the only one with that bent.

Women who work at Jo-Ann’s, at least the ones I met, were creative dreamers limited in their personal expression by circumstance. They were kind and patient—to a fault, this curmudgeon would say. And they genuinely cared about the women who came into the store. In many cases, sales associates had been helping the same women with their creative projects for years.

Many of them told me that they did not think they could get any other kind of work. “I’m just glad I have a job,” was one woman’s reply when I asked her why she did not complain about some of the company’s policies.

Sometimes women stay because they are truly committed to sewing and crafting. They want to help the women who are keeping these skills alive in our culture. That in part describes why I stayed for as long as I did.

On websites that describe employee attitudes to the corporation, women posting there will often say they stayed in spite of difficult and unfair working conditions because of the relationships they had formed with some of the customers.

I could write an entire article about how the corporation uses sales and coupons to extract the maximum amount of profit out of women shopping at Jo-Ann’s. That could be an article all its own.

What I will say here is that I am now torn about shopping at this store. I hate the cheap seasonal merchandise they carry, probably, at incredibly inflated prices. I hate the coupon books they put out every few weeks that promise savings until a customer gets to the store and realizes that everything has been marked down and the coupons cannot be used on ‘sale’ merchandise. I hate that the bulk of Jo-Ann’s stock comes from Asia where God only knows what kind of working conditions must be endured by the employees over there.

But I occasionally shop there because the women who still work there want those jobs. I wish I could support them, their talents and abilities, their dreams and their kindness, without supporting the insatiable maw that is corporate America’s approach to profitability.