Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is cutting some back-office jobs from hundreds of U.S. stores this week as part of the retailer’s continuing efforts to become more efficient and focus spending on store employees who interact with customers.
About 500 stores, mostly on the West Coast, are dropping positions that cover accounting and invoicing for individual stores, said Mark Ibbotson, executive vice president for central operations at Wal-Mart U.S.
A Wal-Mart
WMT, +0.24% store typically has about three employees in those roles, usually high-paid hourly workers who count cash or manage invoices for companies that bring products directly to stores, not through Wal-Mart’s warehouses.
Instead, invoicing will be handled by a central office at Wal-Mart’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters and money will be counted at each store by a “cash recycler” machine, Ibbotson said. The current system is dated and error-prone, Ibbotson said, and “we really want to pull our workforce onto the floor.”
The laid-off workers have been offered other consumer-facing store positions, though they aren’t guaranteed the same hourly wage, said Ibbotson.