World’s Largest Employer Cuts 11,200 Jobs

February 4th, 2010 by Reed Allmand

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is implementing 11,200 job losses at its Sam’s Club warehouses in an effort to stop financial losses being experienced by the discount grocery chain.  Approximately 1,200 of those job losses will be in Texas.

The cuts represent about 10 percent of the warehouse club operator’s 110,000 staffers across its 600 stores. That includes 10,000 workers, mostly part-timers, who offer food samples and showcase products to customers. The company also eliminated 1,200 workers that recruit new members.

Sam’s operates 72 warehouse clubs in Texas, including 20 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The cuts average about 18 workers per store. If that average is true for North Texas stores, about 360 jobs would be lost here.

Wal-Mart has already closed 10 Sam’s Club locations last year, including one Houston location causing 1,500 job losses. But some analysts claim that the job losses won’t have any impact on the local or national economy because workers will be hired by Shopper Events.  I think that may be an erroneous assumption.  First of all, for those who have experienced a job loss, finding new employment has been difficult to say the least.  The average American is remaining unemployed for at least a year and that time period may extend has the economy gets worse.  Another thing we must be aware of is that those who have been affected by the Sam’s Club job losses were already vulnerable.  Many of these workers were part-time and it can probably be safely assumed that they struggled financially to pay full-time bills on a part-time salary.  I suspect that as the economy worsens and job losses continue to mount, we may see more lower-income individuals who have lost part-time jobs consider bankruptcy as way out of their financial crisis.