Advance Auto Parts, the national automotive retailer, is moving more of its corporate assemblage out of Roanoke. A call center which routes all of the corporate phone calls will be outsourced to an IBM call center…in India. A well placed source had confirmed this and it kinda seems to fly in the face of everything the new CEO of Advance has told to the Roanoke community. He has claimed he is not dismantling the Roanoke based company, no no I mean moving its big call center to India and moving most of it’s executives to Minnesota is just a minor shuffling; nothing but field offices, according to Advance’s upper management.
Come on. Is Roanoke stupid? I mean yeah I don’t really care if Advance Auto Parts leaves Roanoke, according to several people whom I know work there hate it. The company is run with an uneven hand; one minute they (the executives) are trying to be folksy and give people hot dogs, the next minute they coldly cut 90 jobs without so much fanfare. The corporate entity that is Advance Auto Parts is a two-faced monster, as evinced by it’s CEO Darren Jackson telling News 7 “What I hope to do is take the Advantages of Roanoke, which there are many, and take the advantages of Minneapolis and its deep pool of retail talent in order to marry the Two…”
That’s a nice kiss-off to Roanoke.
