Walmart lays off corporate employees after slashing forecast
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
One common answer is that they still have work to do, but Walmart will put that work on remaining employees to save a dime. If this is true, why wasn't it being done before? Why is there that much wasted slack in employee productivity potential?
Another common answer is that they hired too fast and now need to readjust for future expectations. This makes sense in terms of smaller startups who may have miscalculated market trends and have limited financial runways, but for the largest private employer on the planet? Who is financially profitable and self-sufficient? Really?
Does management simply pay zero attention to headcount and payroll until a bad quarter happens and then they start cleaning house?
You may have seen many posts about bad management. Here's just another example why those posts are abound.
Notice how the vast majority of workers laid off will not be the same managers who made those bad choices.
A new hire, especially at lower levels, has not promised anything except an exchange of skills for money.
I would even say that the hiring manager promised the company that hiring more headcount will give some benefits. But those benefits never materialized for the company. So by your own logic, a company should first fire the manager who did not fulfil their promise.
I believe what OP meant was that they fulfilled the promise by finding tax deductions, just not enough to justify the cost of their bill. Likewise firing employees has nothing to do with promises: it's just unprofitable to keep them on. If there is no short to medium-term need for the employees, they have to go. The decision may be unpopular, but necessary.
The real question is, who is let go first? The bad decision maker or the skilled workforce that could continue to produce goods with a better decision maker?
It is entirely possible when budgets were available certain initiative made sense to fund. If budgets dry up you start cutting the least harmful thing even if it was still a good idea. It may just not be better than the thing over here that is more profitable or cost effective.
If the hiring decisions are made on simple heuristics such as budget in so hire more, budget gone so fire more - it's not surprising that most engineers don't like their managers, which was my original post.
We can argue all day long about what management could have done but ultimately the bad decision was made by the management chain, not by the employee. In a fairer system, the expectation is that the bad decision makers go first.
You've been working off these assumptions -- that low-level people will be fired first, and that some group of people clearly made "bad decisions" -- since your original comment, and keep repeating them in some form in all subsequent comments, without a single shred of evidence for either.
They are getting rid of 200 people, not very many at Wal-Mart's size, and are still hiring in multiple key areas. Maybe they just decided, with business contracting, it was the right time to eliminate the slackers, the less-skilled, the I'd-never-shop-at-Wal-Marts, the morale-draggers.
> the more important your skill of "foresight" is
Nobody foresaw a global pandemic shutting down economies and freezing major trade routes from Asia, to be followed by massive inflation and huge increases in borrowing costs.
b) Yes, using my examples above, the company should fire the head of the corp analytics department, and the in-house creative agency, and the head of some digital initiatives. But the entire dept has to go too. Sorry if you just got hired, or you're low-level, that's life.
c) "fulfill a promise" doesn't fly in corporate world. There are no "promises". Companies try things, some work and some don't. They make good decisions and bad ones. Sometimes a thing works great, then the economy changes, a competitor comes in, or new tech is developed. I'm sure that President of 35mm film at Kodak was a prestigious job for decades. Now it isn't. It's not because someone failed to deliver on a "promise".
And hiring/onboarding costs money.
So to answer your question, headcount changes have a very long lead time.
If you update your forecast and realize you’ll need fewer people 6 months from now, you start laying off people today.
[1] Amazon layoffs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32338354
[2] Walmart's strategy vs. Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx_XGfGB2VE
[3] Ad industry slowdown: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32338444
Hypothesis: Ecommerce and ads boomed during the pandemic, and this fueled Walmart to aggressively compete with Amazon. The extra money during covid was invested in these riskier, more "innovative" efforts.
Now that consumer spending and the ad industry is slowing down, the growth prospects on these sectors and the corporate workforce behind them is no longer sustainable. Maybe they over hired and now need to be more conservative.
Article indicates otherwise:
> Walmart is still hiring in parts of its business that are growing, including supply chain, e-commerce, health and wellness, and advertising sales.
You ever make a personal budget, decide you don't need the daily coffee shop trip, cut out buying the newest ____, etc?
Why weren't you doing that before?
b) congratulations if you could lose 50-100% of your income and only need to drop luxuries. for the majority of the population, it would require sacrificing housing, clothing, healthcare or food to some extent.