In an effort to make their stores more cost efficient, Walmart is planning on cutting around 7,000 back-office jobs
Although Walmart is perceived as one of the largest retailers in the United States and the world, even the retail giant has to make its own cutbacks from time to time.
According to Sarah Nassauer from the Wall Street Journal, Walmart is planning on cutting over 7,000 jobs across the country. These jobs are specifically back office jobs, specifically accounting and invoicing positions. These employees are mostly long-term ones that are some of the highest paid hourly workers across the company.
“You are not running around the store on your feet all day,” a Walmart accounting employee told Nassauer about the back office positions. “Everybody wants to get in there. The jobs never open up.”
Rather than have accounting and invoicing employees in each store, Walmart reportedly plans to centralize these activities to be more efficient while having in store employees focus on customer interaction.
As physical retail stores like Walmart try to compete with online platforms like Amazon, they are spending a lot of money to try and beef up their online presence. This is putting plenty of pressure on retail workers, who are starting to find out quickly that their jobs can quickly be eliminated to save the company money.
Walmart will continue to go through major changes as they attempt to compete with Amazon, so we will be sure to keep an eye on the retail giant moving forward. Hopefully there won’t be many more layoffs in the near future.
