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.
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(NYSE:WMT) announced that it plans to eliminate jobs in accounting and other back-office tittles, which includes invoicing roles at almost 500 of its locations in the western US. There will be a centralized team that will handle invoicing.
Mr. Lundberg told CNBC that the real motive behind this strategy is to “make the stores easier to run and free up associates so that they can interact with customers more and serve them better”. “How can we get the focus less on the backroom jobs?” The company will use cash recycler machines to automatically count money at the stores.
“We really want to pull our workforce onto the floor”, said Ibbotson.
Actively used by more than 20 million customers each month, the app enables users to check in to pick up an online order at a Walmart store, refill pharmacy prescriptions and find an item’s store location, among other features. The latest news is merely an expansion of the pilot program.
The country’s largest private employer has spent billions over two years to raise wages for mostly entry-level staff and streamline procedures for stocking shelves and managing inventory, in large part to improve the shopping experience.
Earlier this year, the company, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, said it was shuttering 154 stores in the USA, a rare pruning on its home turf.
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The company also said in January that as they shift towards Neighborhood Markets and Supercenters in lucrative locations, they are opening about 405 stores globally in the upcoming fiscal year.
