I just spoke....with my old friend Dallas.....
He currently is the manager for the Detroit Branch of the Hoover Company. I called him this morning, and wanted to hear the news myself. It's true, and he's really torn up over it.
He was the one who hired me into our old (defunct)Hoover Sales/Service Center in Howell Michigan. He did verify that they are closing, and that it would be all over as stated by December 31st. He just got the news last week via- private e-mail from Glenwillow Ohio. They didn't even have to goddamned decency to send someone. They broke up his immediate future for him online...How romantic.
IMHO opinion, Hoover got their illness defined for them along time ago, and it had nothing to do with when they discontinued the beater bars, the Convertibles or even the Celebrity canisters. Hoover became quite ill about the time that they were bought out, or sold, or sold out to Chicago Pacific. That illness spread when they no longer were allowed to make their own corporate choices. Chicago Pacific I believe allowed Hoover to make many of it's choices, but clearly did not run with a free hand as they may have done in the past.
(As a sidenote)- It's been well known that beaterbars lost their true effectiveness as carpet styles changed thruought the seventies and eighties. Most carpets were too thick to have the "Triple Action Agitation" work as well as it's creators intended, and on low nap floors, which also were popular during those periods, the beaterbars knocked the bejeesus out of them causing unraveling , and knocking loose the gluedown carpets by vibrating loose the glue backing.
Triple action diddn't die because of company want, it was their sales motto for decades, it just fell by the wayside in Hoovers rush to compete with their peers, and a change in styles.
I will agree that the company did help to put themselves into a bind, by putting out some pretty bad stuff before Maytag even blew into town. They were putting out the crap back when Chicago Pacific owned them. Hoover was always trying to be "everybodies something", making seventy two different models of cleaners, for whatever reason. They kept chepaening their stuff along the way, to satisfy investors, stockholders, and their own board of directors. Maximum return on minimum investment. The disease started to spead..
The company directors, planners and product people KNEW that it could (like the auto industry) glide for years on it's sterling reputation, but never did so, up until people above them started calling the shots. It resisted the trend for years, while we consumer brats demanded cheaper items. Thier lords heard that cry, got scared and pandered to our wants.
And who helped put those terrible measures or quality and usefulness??? The original sellouts. It' pointless to go into names, but many of them started this trend before Hoover did.
Once Hoover had other people "help" control the show, they began to put out cheaper stuff, and sold us that "inexpensive item that we had to have. And continued doing so from the Hoover Elite forward. Hoovers vacuums were never the same after 1985. I use that as the start year for Hoover beginning to cheapen everything in an effort to save money (see after being purchased by Chicago Pacific, 1984).
Fast forward to when Maytag purchased them. Maytag Company, with their smugness, coming in with their lean sigma and all that other crap, just gutted and ruined the company forever.
By the time I began to work for Hoover those years of trading on the great name were starting to show. And Hoover was very weak and trying to stay above water. But the company itself by that time was in no position to reverse course. And really had no one at the helm to try and do it, and the strenght wasn't there; a sad though but one that seems rather true.
Those Hoover WindTunnel Self Propelled models had an ENORMOUS repair rate, from busted self-propelled mechanicals, to broken brushrollers, to melted bearing endcaps to anme a few things. This all leading up to their "class action' repair of the switches in Hoover WT's that melted, caught on fire, or simply shocked their owners.
But wait, Then they introduced the second wave of garbage which was the Hoover Dual V WindTunnel models that literally rang louder and louder the death knell for what was horrid quality from Hoover. These machines.....I cannot BEGIN to list all the stuff that went wrong with these. But suffice to say to repa SOME of their investment back, they reconstituted it into the Hoover Saavy, which was no better, and broke just as easily as the blunder Hoover was trying to get away from.
Then they moved onto their SteamVac line giving it a tank so cheap, that it cracked and leaked all over within a few uses, turbine meachinism's that siezed when moisture got in.
Yes...there were a few bright spots duirng those years, but it was not enough to stop the crushing weight of new product failures that drove Hoovers once reputation six feet under...
But I digress...
The Hoover DIVISION died effective when Maytag sent in the first wave to do as it saw best for the company. Part of that destructive wave o' Maytag, helped them to decide to close several company owned stores. Mine closed the same day as these final throes of shutdowns December 31st, 2003. This was in their first wave of duping the divisions of a company that by that time was almost 100 years old.
Maytag did what Chicago Pacific never did, and Hoover would never have dreamed of doing in it's heyday.....They gutted budgets everywhere, personell at the main plant in N.Canton, and then they gutted thier first stores therafter. It was all a slow systematic shutdown. That to me seemed more painful than anything.
The company sent my district manager, and a traveling saleman (who went from store to store as a liasion between you and the company) to shut me down. Just a few weeks before the news hit from on high, they were up at my store ( the two who wer sent to close my store) claiming grand prospects for my store, and a bright sunny future, and even a fancy high price dinner between myself and those tow...where both of them got plotzed, and "I" had to drive them to their hotel.
That should have been a sign.
Well we can see now a scant five years later what kind of sunny future everyone got. I was just fortunate enough to get into the private sector again before the bottom fell out on jobs here in the last few months. BUT am I really immune??
A sad tale to tell, but one that has been watched by me from the sidelines from around 1987 or so, when I really began to follow the industry, and mostly Hoover actions both past and present...Funny cause now their little left to record or tell....
Chad
