Wal-Mart to axe thousands of back-office positions in US
02 Sep 2016
Wal-Mart Stores Inc will axe thousands of back-office positions across the US.
The largest private employer in the US will cut 7,000 store accounting and invoicing positions over the next several months.
Most of the positions that are set to go are held by long-term employees, often some of the highest paid hourly workers in stores.
According to company executives, the retailer wanted the employees to be working with shoppers, not in backrooms, The Wall Street Journal reported.
These desk jobs in retail are highly coveted, they added. ''You are not running around the store on your feet all day'' and receive decent pay, according to a Wal-Mart store accounting employee who earned about $13 an hour, or $27,000 a year, WSJ reported.
''Everybody wants to get in there. The jobs never open up,'' said this person, who has worked at the store for nine years.
According to commentators, the move marked a change that retail workers, one of the largest groups of employees in the US workforce faced as retailers sought to take away traffic from other chains.
The positions that would be eliminated at Wal-Mart related to managemet of an individual store's daily cash flow or process claims from manufacturers delivering goods directly to stores, among other tasks.
US stores as the discount retailer redeploys workers to improve in-store customer service.
According to commentators, Walmart would benefit by putting additional workers on the floor helping customers. According to a company spokesperson Walmart expected that the affected employees were likely to find customer-facing roles at the Walmart store.
The positions that would go include counting cash or managing invoices for suppliers. Invoicing would be taken up at a central office at company headquarters in Arkansas, while money would be counted at each store by a ''cash recycler'' machine.
The new cuts come as Walmart looks to shift more of its spending onto employees who work on the store floor stocking shelves and interacting with customers.