But they also buried the other big factor: They offered everyone $1000 to quit. They also didn't actually completely end flexible working hours, they just raised the minimum working hours to 20 per week and required that they be performed during core hours:
> employees would now be required to work at least 20 hours per week on a set schedule during regular business hours; their log-on and log-off times would be tracked, and stylists would at least temporarily no longer be allowed to become full-time employees. Those who couldn’t work within the new rules were offered a $1,000 bonus to quit
So it's not as simple as the headline makes it sound. It would have been helpful to know how many of those employees who quit were already working the minimum of 20 hours per week during core hours.
If they lost a lot of key workers, that's a big deal. If they lost a lot of people putting in a few hours here and there and those workers got $1000 for it, then this is a non-story. I suppose we can't really know.
From personal experience: Flexible work is great, but infinitely flexible working hours quickly becomes a huge pain. Without setting core hours and minimums, you end up with a long tail of workers who want to put in a couple hours here and there at weird hours. This might work if you workload is 100% asynchronous, requires virtually no training, and has minimal managerial intervention, but eventually the odd hours and inconsistent working schedules take a toll on everyone else who has to work around the flex employees. Constraining flex hours to certain windows and requiring a minimum is actually a very reasonable policy, IMO.
Your assumption of things aren’t close, and they didn’t lose employees who barely worked. They lost employees who have anything else going on between the hours of 8-8 between Tues-Sat, and worked the job for flexibility..
That's exactly the same thing a human stylist would do + making sure the outfit pieces look good together (Which I assume the algorithm is also trained to do).
As much as I want to believe that a human in the end would do a better job, I think an algorithm is capable of becoming a more accurate and dynamic stylist than a human.
Unless you want to be a trend-setter or do some artistic expression through your clothing. In those cases a human stylist does make sense. But for the regular Joe, I think a well trained algorithm can perform better than a human.
So a human (usually with a fashion background and retail experience) is going to be able to perform better in pretty much every scenario with their algorithm “helping”