Walmart Announces Job Cuts At About 500 Stores

Walmart plans to cut jobs at about 500 of its stores in an effort to centralize and update its invoicing policies, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The workers that Walmart will lay off have back-office roles and oversee invoicing and other accounting tasks for individual stores, Walmart executive Mark Ibbotson told the Journal. Once these workers are laid off, invoicing duties will be transferred to Walmart's central office in Arkansas.

Each Walmart store generally employs three workers in these relatively high-paid, back-office roles, the Journal reported. Walmart will offer new customer-facing positions to the laid off workers, but the company will not guarantee they will retain the same wage. In the new roles, workers will make at least $17.55 an hour, Ibbotson told the Wall Street Journal.

The jobs cuts are part of Walmart's new strategy to focus on customer-facing roles and to upgrade its out-of-date practices regarding invoicing at individual stores, the paper reported.

"We really want to pull our workforce onto the floor,” Ibbotson told the Journal.

In January the retail giant announced that it would close 269 stores worldwide, including 154 in the United States.

>>> Read the full story from The Wall Street Journal.

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