As Bidenomics continues to batter the country, U.S. retail giant Walmart is cutting hundreds of corporate jobs and is even asking some employees to relocate to larger corporate hubs.
The chain is asking some workers in smaller offices in Dallas, Atlanta, and Toronto to relocate to larger hubs, including Bentonville, Arkansas; Hoboken, New Jersey; and Northern California, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The company is also cracking down on corporate staffers working at home and requiring them to spend more time at the office, though some will still be working from home.
Walmart recently refurbished its Bentonville offices, including several buildings, a fitness center, a pool, a child care facility, and a layout center, according to KHBS.
The workers who were given the chance to keep their jobs if they relocate were told they have until July to make their decision.
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Walmart has tens of thousands of U.S. corporate employees across the country and, like many companies, moved to remote work during the COVID scare, allowing thousands of employees to work from home, CNBC reported in 2020.
“This is likely just part of a broader push towards operational efficiency. The mandate that remote workers report into the office is the closet way to get people to quit instead of doing a layoff,” Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management, told Reuters.
“Giving people a choice to relocate to a hub isn’t much of a choice. It’s more of a choice of whether to quit or not,” Jacobsen explained.
The Wall Street Journal added that the company has been working to cut costs for at least a year, which includes the move to shut down all its 51 health clinics that had been opened in the last five years.
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The company added that the healthcare field has become too challenging due to rising operating costs and the challenging reimbursement problems that “make the care business unsustainable for us at this time.”
In February, the retailer also announced it was closing 63 stores, including stores in Chicago.
“The simplest explanation is that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago,” the company said in a statement.
“These stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years,” Walmart said in the statement, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported.
Walmart 4626 W Diversey closed#Chicago pic.twitter.com/X9xpTSUtEI
— 𝕮𝖍𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖌𝖔𝕾𝖈𝖆𝖓𝖓𝖊𝖗 (@Chicago_Scanner) June 3, 2020
Theft problems are not relegated just to the Windy City. Retail theft has been a major problem for most retailers. But Walmart has also had to devote much time and money to theft prevention.
One way of combating theft has been to begin shifting back to traditional checkout lines to put employee eyes back on the checkout process. After tests in St. Louis and New Mexico, the company is planning on rolling self-checkout back in more locations across the nation, according to Newsweek.
Economic news has been steadily trending downward for the better part of a year despite the uptick seen after COVID ended. And the retail sector has been hard hit.
In May it was reported that 169 retail stores had closed in just one week, up 12.3 percent up from the previous year.
