Following the announcement of layoffs at U.S. retailers Albertsons and Kroger, Walmart has announced plans to lay off or relocate more than 800 corporate employees.
As part of the massive retailer’s broader relocation strategy that began last year, Walmart is closing its office in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.A., and the company is also asking employees in Hoboken, New Jersey, as well as some of its smaller offices across the country, to relocate either to its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, or its office in Sunnyvale, California, according to a 4 February memo from Donna Morris, Walmart’s chief people officer, per Grocery Dive.
Since the memo was sent out, the retailer has shared more specific layoff and relocation numbers via Supermarket News. Walmart Spokesperson Nick DeMoss said the number of employees impacted include 481 in Hoboken, 267 in Charlotte, and 79 in San Bruno, California.
Walmart does not know yet how many of the workers will choose to relocate. The deadline to make a decision outlined in the retailer’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notices is 13 June.
Unlike the Charlotte office, the Hoboken and San Bruno offices will remain open, according to DeMoss, but at a smaller scale. The number of people affected at the two remaining facilities are “a relatively small subset of the total population,” he said.
Similarly, Boise, Idaho-based retailer Albertsons aims to lay off 156 Safeway employees at two offices in Pleasanton, California, according to WARN notices, along with around 225 Safeway employees at its Phoenix, Arizona-based office.
The company recently reported a sales increase in its third quarter results for its 2024 fiscal year and said it is in strong financial condition, but the company said in a statement about the layoffs that it “cannot stand still and must constantly recalibrate our company to compete in a rapidly changing market.”
“Our strategy … includes finding new sources of productivity to enable us to invest in growth,” Albertsons said. “After many years of productivity efforts across several parts of our company, we recently turned our attention to our general and administrative expenses and made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our corporate and division support workforce.”
The Albertsons move followed its failed merger with Cincinnati, Ohio-based Kroger, the latter chain of which also announced layoffs of as many as 200 employees.
“As we continue delivering fresh, affordable food to our customers, we are focusing on key priority areas that support our go-to-market strategy. As part of this prioritization work, we announced team restructures and a small number of eliminated roles to improve efficiency,” a Kroger spokesperson said in a statement emailed to SeafoodSource while declining to provide additional details.
