Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest retailer and a rare bright star in the grim retailing universe, said Tuesday that it planned to cut 700 to 800 jobs at its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., as it made broad changes to its operations.þþDavid Tovar, a spokesman for Wal-Mart, said in a telephone interview that “the changes are designed to align our staffing and organizational structure, to increase operational efficiencies, support our strategic growth plans and help reduce our overall costs.” þþThe job cuts do not affect store employees and are relatively small considering that Wal-Mart employs more than 1.4 million people in the United States alone. About 14,000 people work at the company’s Arkansas headquarters. The cuts will affect merchandising, real estate, marketing and support staff positions for Wal-Mart’s United States operations as well as merchandising and corporate functions at Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart. þþWhile some Wal-Mart divisions will lose jobs, others will gain. For instance, Wal-Mart is opening fewer stores, so it needs fewer employees in its real estate group. But there will be more remodeling and relocation of existing stores, creating jobs in Wal-Mart’s store planning group. þþSimilarly, Wal-Mart wants its buyers, who are based in Arkansas, to be based in New York, where some of its apparel team already works. So jobs are being eliminated in one city and created in another. Mr. Tovar said he did not yet know exactly how many managerial or in-store jobs Wal-Mart would add in 2009 but that it would be in the tens of thousands. þþSome jobs are being cut because they are redundant. For example, Wal-Mart’s pharmacy, optical and health clinic teams are being combined into one health and wellness group, which will enable the retailer to cut support staff positions. þþ“If there is one constant in our organization, it is change,” Michael T. Duke, president and chief executive of Wal-Mart, said in a letter to employees on Tuesday. He added that Wal-Mart must “challenge costs in every corner of the company in order to keep our business strong today and well into the future.”þþIn the last few weeks, thousands of jobs have been eliminated by retailers, including Macy’s, Home Depot, Saks and Neiman Marcus. Wal-Mart’s cuts are modest compared with those of other chains like Saks, which laid off 9 percent of its work force. þþStill, as Mr. Duke said in his letter, “We find ourselves living in unprecedented times.” That a retailer already committed to penny-pinching would cut back further seemed to underscore the severity of the recession.þþ“The Wal-Mart C.E.O. office is the most modest C.E.O. office I have ever seen in my life,” said Bill Dreher, senior retailing analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities. “Most people’s basements look better than his office, O.K.? It’s not lavish. These are guys that need to share hotel rooms when they travel. Even an operator like this realizes they have to scale back.”þþUnion groups have long expressed frustration, though, about the millions of dollars earned by Wal-Mart’s top executives and members of the founding family. “We would have hoped that during this tough time, the company would have used some of that wealth to reinvest in its work force,” said David Nassar, a spokesman for Wal-Mart Watch, a union-financed advocacy group. þþWal-Mart said it began informing employees of the cuts on Thursday and would continue to do so over the next few weeks. þþShares were down $1.56, or 3.17 percent, on Tuesday, to $47.72.þþ
Source: NY Times
