Alliance Data to close Jacksonville call center
230 local jobs will be lost
BY LELAND ACKER

Thursday's announcement that Alliance Data will soon close its Jacksonville call center means that approximately 230 Cherokee County jobs will be lost.

"According to the company, the call center will be closing April 18," said Darrell Prcin, president of the Jacksonville Economic Development Corporation (JEDCO).

Mr. Prcin said the closure will mean the loss of 200 full-time jobs and 30 part-time jobs.

"Those employees come from Jacksonville, Tyler and a lot of them are from Rusk and Alto," he said. "A lot of the employees are from Cherokee County. It's a pretty dramatic impact."

Mr. Prcin said officials from Alliance Data cited staffing difficulties as a reason for closing the call center.

"They have high turnover and it is difficult staffing this location," he said. "In this type of work, you are on the phone all day dealing with a variety of issues. Call centers have high turnover because there are a lot of people who try it then decide it's not what they want to do."

Mr. Prcin said Alliance Data appeared to be trying to make the closure as easy as possible on the employees by offering employees positions elsewhere in the company and by helping JEDCO hold a job fair.

The closure impacts Jacksonville's unemployment rate of five percent in a community that has been hit hard by the global economy. Mr. Prcin said the corporate ownership of the local manufacturing plants takes control away from local management, increasing the risk of plants closing, being combined with plants in other locations, or being moved overseas.

Mr. Prcin said the challenge to JEDCO is the difficulty in attracting corporate-owned manufacturing facilities. He said the locally owned plastics companies tended to be the more stable employers.

Jacksonville is home to 21,000 jobs and generates 83 percent of Cherokee County's sales tax revenue.