The cuts include staffers in last-mile delivery and merchandising. According to Bloomberg, Walmart will also add an unspecified number of jobs in areas such as ecommerce, health and wellness, ad sales and supply chain.
Walmart is now updating their structure, evolving some roles to better position the company. The firm mentioned in an email they’re investing in key areas and creating new roles to support the services for their customers, suppliers, and business community.
Walmart’s move comes after slashing its annual profit forecast for the second time in less than three months. US consumers are pulling back on clothing and durable-goods purchases as soaring inflation raises the cost of food and basic items. That’s prompting Walmart to cut prices on general merchandise even as grocery sales continue to rise.
The shares fell less than 1% in extended trading in New York. Walmart has dropped 9.8% so far in 2022.
Trimming the corporate workforce isn’t an unusual move for Walmart as the company eliminated hundreds of corporate jobs around the same time of year in 2020.
In 2020, Walmart’s deal to sell its Vudu streaming service to Fandango has also resulted in a wave of layoffs at the retail giant’s tech hub in Sunnyvale. In a notice received by the California Employment Development Department, Walmart stated that 216 tech workers would be laid off from its facility in Sunnyvale.
As Walmart moved to merge its online business with its US stores, the consolidation meant some workers were dismissed in the process.
Inventories surged during the company’s fiscal first quarter, in part because of a mismatch between customer demand and its merchandise. In addition to spending more on groceries because of the highest US inflation in four decades, consumers who were cooped up in their homes earlier in the pandemic have been shifting some dollars to services such as travel and restaurants.
As concerns rise about economic activity slowing, other companies have also been shrinking their workforces or tapping the brakes on hiring plans. Meta Platforms, for example, said it was slashing its hiring goals for engineers by at least 30% in 2022. Alphabet Inc.’s Google told employees it would slow hiring the rest of 2022.
Just 9% of tech workers are feeling confident in their job security, according to a survey from Blind. More than 32,000 people have been laid off from the US tech sector in 2022, according to Crunchbase data.
Job-market fears are being fueled by months of headlines about hiring freezes, job offers being rescinded, and mass layoffs from burgeoning upstarts and tech giants alike, including Robinhood.
The layoffs in the sector are happening for a variety of reasons. The market is very different now than it was in 2021, when dealmaking was happening at a rapid pace, and investors were jumping into funding rounds with sky-high valuations. Several venture capitalists and private equity firms, for example, have been warning their portfolio companies to preserve cash and look for ways they can cut costs. Oftentimes, that comes in the form of hiring freezes or job cuts.
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