Walmart’s Latest Layoffs and Relocations

Matt reads a recent article about Walmart’s plans to lay off some employees and relocate offices in bigger cities like Dallas to the headquarters in Arkansas.

Video Transcript: 

Walmart is laying off, the box retailer confirmed layoffs in the memo. Chief People Officer Donna Morris –  Donna Morris I guess, said the move is meant to bring more of its employees back to the office. Wait a minute – they’re laying them off how’s that bringing them back to the office? The company brought corporate employees back to its Bentonville Arkansas headquarters. Now she said Walmart is taking that a step further, the majority of employees working remotely in Dallas, Atlanta, and Toronto have been asked to relocate. Most will be moved to the company’s Arkansas headquarters. In addition, some parts of our business may change that will result in a reduction of several hundred campus roles. While the overall numbers are small in percentage, we are focused on supporting each of our associates affected by the change. The layoffs are the latest cost cut for the discounter. In April, Walmart announced it would shutter 51 health clinics. The new clinics which offered doctor, dentist, and therapy appointments, were part of Walmart Health. And I guess that wasn’t working out cause they closed them. Walmart is the nation’s largest private employer with 1.6 million employees. Walmart has another reason to bring more employees to Bentonville, it is building a nearly 350-acre campus. So I guess they gotta put people in the office that they’re building.

I mean as businesses grow and change and evolve things go up and things go down. Hopefully, you always want them to go up and always be adding people, but sometimes you realize that you went down a direction. Like maybe with the health clinics, that wasn’t really the direction the company wanted to go or wasn’t working out the way the company thought. It wasn’t bringing in the revenue expected. And so you have to make changes. A company as big as Walmart, it’s good that they’re continuing to try stuff because you can’t get stale. But not everything you try is gonna work. Google, Amazon, all these companies have the same issue. You go down a certain road, you think, you know, it might work out it doesn’t. That results in people getting let go and that’s never fun and it’s never enjoyable and it’s never something you want to happen. But sometimes the business reality is just that people need to get let go. And it looks like part of that is what’s happening here. I’m not sure I understand why, if people were working productively in jobs that aren’t getting terminated, just because they’re remote why they’re getting asked to relocate to Bentonville Arkansas. That may be a big ask for somebody who’s in Dallas or Toronto to come all the way to Arkansas just to keep their job. But I, you know, there may be some internal logic that’s going on there that, you know. This is just part of how the business world works. And hopefully, those people, if they don’t stay, can find something else, and if they do decide to move then, you know, it all works out. But this is just one of those changes that happens in the business world.