The retailer has just made a major cost-cutting move that puts its corporate employees in a tough position.
Patricia Battle
May 14, 2024 - TheStreet
Walmart (WMT) has officially doubled down on a growing trend in corporate America. The retail giant is laying off hundreds of its employees and is pushing most of its remote workers to work out of large office hubs, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.
Employees will still be able to work remotely, but will be expected to work from offices most of the time. Also, employees who already work in small office locations in Dallas, Toronto and Atlanta are allegedly being pushed to relocate and work out of Walmart’s larger headquarters in Arkansas, California and New Jersey.
This is not the first time Walmart pushed its employees to relocate in order to retain their jobs. Last year, the retailer closed three of its U.S. tech hubs, requiring hundreds of its employees to relocate so that they can work out of primary offices located in other states, according to the Journal. At that time, Walmart also began to expect employees to work from an office at least two days a week.
The new cost-cutting move from Walmart comes right before it’s supposed to report its first-quarter earnings for 2024 on May 16. In its last earnings release, which was released on Feb. 20, the company revealed that its revenue grew by 5.7% during the fourth quarter of 2023, but is U.S. same-store sales only grew by 3.7%, which is a decline from the 4.7% it reported in the previous quarter, signaling a slow down in consumer spending.
Walmart joins a list of major employers who are pushing their employees to return to the office after allowing them to work remotely since the Covid pandemic in 2020. In January, it was revealed that Bank of America was threatening its workers with “disciplinary action” for not complying with its RTO policy that reportedly requires some employees to work from the office three days a week, and others to work from home for a certain amount of days a month.
Also, Dell has reportedly begun tracking its employees on May 13 via their badge swipes and VPN connections to make sure they are adhering to its new return-to-office policy that requires them to work out of the office three days a week.
In addition to strict RTO policies, layoffs have also been on the rise this year. So far, 289 tech companies have laid off 83,749 workers, according to data from Layoffs.fyi.