Thread regarding Walmart layoffs

I keep hearing that the new HQ can only hold about half the people that currently work at the home office buildings right now.

I think Walmart won’t ever officially move out of Bentonville, but a lot of functions won’t be there anymore. They’re just going to thin out their Bentonville presence over time so as to avoid the negative press.

That’s what I see out of all of this.

The idea of the HO moving out of Bentonville and the announcement of the NWA HO relocation being some kind of smokescreen is silly theory... very silly! The dominos have been moving for months now, years even... to make way for the new HO location in Bentonville. Utility and infustructure work has been happening all around us for a few years now. Not to mention the land that’s been consolidated between Central, J St. and 14th. If you have eyes and drive anywhere around the current HO you can clearly see this is going to happen. The Walton’s have a vision for Bentonville that will ALWAYS include a HO presence. Layoffs will continue... new hires are continuing right along with these layoffs. I hate the disruption this is causing and the fear and challenges it presents on the family level. However, a hole isn’t going to open up and swallow the NWA Walmart HO. The skies are cloudy but it isn’t falling!

I have lived all over the country and generally like living in Northwest Arkansas but I can realize that it may be a net drag on recruiting certain types of skill sets here.

However, I just don't see WMT being allowed by the board or the family to move large scale portions of the company out of Bentonville. This was floated years ago for Sam's before it made it up to the board before it was denied. The family has since spent a lot of money to upgrade the area.

Marc Lore may want to move the company but it's not going to happen. Pieces of the company, yes. HQ, no. Every major supplier has an office here already.

@4myn You took the words right out of my mouth. And I do see what @4ngm says about buying. That actually might be one of the few things that survive in Bentonville past the 24-36 month time frame.

Pay attention to what @4myn wrote. He or she is right. Whether you work for Walmart or the vendor community, start looking for other work now. Try to get yourself into a place with multiple employment options.

NWA won’t die overnight, but neither did areas dependent on steel, or cars, or textiles, or coal. Arkansas state and local government should be trying like hell to bring in new businesses, but if it happens at all, it won’t be quick.

I could see buying eventually merging with online and leaving Bentonville. Marc Lore has a lot of influence with the board right now. From what I can tell he has a blank check. Moving buying wouldn’t be out of character given these recent changes.

@4myn, good post! What are your thoughts about functions like the buying function staying here? A lot of CPG companies have invested heavily and built offices and staff to house their sales organization that calls on Walmart. If Walmart were to pull that out, I think it could collapse the NWA area. It would be too big of a deal to expect the vendor community to relocate all their people elsewhere.

There's several things that are true in this thread:

1) NWA is a toxic area. Younger workers coming out of college do not want to come here AND stay here. So, there's no long term young labor growth potential to sustain company growth.

2) Executives and high level managers for the other business units (Jet, Hayneedle, Bonobos, Modcloth, etc) don't want to move their families to NWA. Can you image what executive and high leadership meetings are like when this topic comes up? Those people are contract employees - they have employment contracts in place and some of them might have location/relocation clauses that gives them leverage to avoid Bentonville.

3) CEO level leadership for Walmart will have to change in the next 18 months to avoid the eventual issues between Marc and Doug and the board. As the business moves more and more to the future (online) the way of doing business and reacting to trends and buyers habits will have to be much faster and much more creative. Jet already has that mentality. It'll be easier to simply get rid of the "Old" rather than trying to "fix" it. That means there's going to less and less of a presence in Bentonville as important decisions and strategy get done in other locations.

4) It's easy to change plans plans when virtually nothing has been done yet. These "plans" to bring up a new HO can get tabled with a simple vote and stroke of the pen.

More probably, what we're going to see is a massive resource shift to India, California, New Jersey and other high tech locations, such as Austin. Some administration might stay in Bentonville as a nod to the Walton family and pressure from the city/county to keep a presence there in order to keep the local economy from collapsing in.

But, anyone who thinks Bentonville is going to be the mecca of Walmart 24-36 months from now is simply not living in reality.

Having worked with a number of BPO/BPM arrangements that are offshore, I'm surprised they haven't moved that type of work offshore. It's so much cheaper than keeping it in the U.S., and not nearly as critical to the business as core IT.

E-commerce may be the way of the future, but as of now our E-commerce business is something around 4% of total sales for the company. They are going to have to increase that number significantly before booting NWA.

4jrw,

The reason I think it will happen is that dot com leadership doesn’t want to live here and online is the new company focus.

I think the excuse will be made that they can’t recruit talent here or that the Bentonville culture is too conservative\toxic.

As more and more of the company growth comes from online, the power will shift. I don’t know what that time horizon is though. It’s all speculation anyhow.

Just for argument’s sake, both Amazon and Apple are building second headquarters/campuses. So why would Bentonville/NWA automatically be given a death sentence from Walmart future. It’s been e-commerce in CA for years now jet.com in NJ...why would it be so bad to continue a bi-coastal presence with NWA being a center anchor?

Walmart will be a completely different company in 18 months. Once Mark L takes over and moves most decision making and leadership to CA, they will get out of all leased building in Bentonville and sell some of the property, I would put no faith that any new HO building will be utilized as a HQ for anything. Did you think executives and leadership for those companies we bought were actually going to move to Bentonville? That's a laugh.

@1ohv You're smart and others should do what you're doing. I'd never wish decline on NWA but it's coming. Most towns and cities are built around a promise of making money, and when the money goes away, so does the city. Story of a thousand railroad towns, gold rush towns, even ancient civilizations built around farmland that became unusable.

@2ney Agreed, I don't think Bentonville will ever be completely out of the picture for Walmart, but its importance will continue to be scaled back and eventually it won't be HQ.

I don’t think the announcement about the new home office means much. As more and more new blood comes into leadership, I can foresee them not wanting to live in Bentonville.

Eventually one of them will make the call to move the home office somewhere they want to live.

It's started. We are witnessing the first stage of economic collapse that is going to affect the entire NWA region. Bentonville is surely the next Detroit. I saw that in another post and I believe it's inevitable now. My wife and I both have been applying for jobs out of state and we're putting our house up for sale. We just have one child, and he's just a baby, so we can pull up stakes and get out without a family disruption. If we stay any longer, it'll only get more difficult. There's tons of jobs out there. Unemployment is low across the US. Most companies are offering signing bonuses of $10k or higher, plus relocation programs where they buy your house on this end and offer home buying assistance on the other end. Most companies have bonuses that are real bonuses and salaries considerably higher than what the "Cost Of Labor" in NWA (which, by the way is completely controlled by Walmart).

http://www.omaha.com/news/nebraska/this-would-probably-be-the-biggest-ghost-town-sidney-worries/article_dd55c802-4c04-5a13-967e-4d75ff27b240.html

There's a good article that pretty much describes the fear associated with losing the company in a company town. Cabela's was bought by Bass Pro Shop and layoffs ensued. For bonus points go look at Zillow for Sidney, NE and focus on property histories. Impossible to sell even with massive price cuts.

Walmart is not moving the HO out of that area. If you don't like the area then move somewhere else and work, this is a large Country with plenty of opportunity. Don't get stuck somewhere you don't want to stay. Live somewhere that you are going to be happy. Walmart doesn't care about your ideas, input and growth. Walmart like all Corporations are looking for the lowest paid and most qualified individual that will execute without thought or challenge. Get out of that dead, stale environment and begin to breath and grow again, CHALLENGE YOURSELF. Invest in yourself and your future and move.

In my dealings with the Walmart Corporate associates in key positions they fit the Corporate image(Think that they are important since they have a title, think that they know more than anyone else because of the title, and then become complacent and brain dead as the world keeps passing them by). Amazon won't be the last book company to pass them. Walmart is looking for the easy route, hince the move years ago into Grocery, as it will keep them alive.

It’s voted top places to leave in retiree magazines because of low property tax. It’s the worst for young singles without families, they get to pay insane sales and income tax to subsidize all the old people.

@RiILZET-zqc That was funny!!! When I came to Walmart in 2011, I read beforehand that NWA was a transient area. People come to get experience and leave.

This Bedford Falls has turned into Pottersville

I met a few really smart people on visits to HO. None of them are from Arkansas originally and none plan to stay there indefinitely.

tzk - Reminds me of the last time David Glass came to the DGTC. He said something in line with "Sam and I agreed that being located in Bentonville would make it hard for people to leave." I'm sure since he was speaking to associates he meant that as the common "NWA is great" line but the cynic in me instantly thought, "Because there's nowhere else to work in the middle of nowhere...". Bentonville's economy is a captive audience to Walmart.

@hpr - That's a wise observation.

@gmf - You reek of realtor smell. I don't live in NWA but anytime I mention it to people they have no clue where Bentonville is or that it's a "top place to live". Maybe it's a top place to live in Arkansas Living magazine but otherwise it's a no-name place that only people in retail know about. Sorry.

No one is saying homes in NWA aren't affordable or the area isn't green and pretty. That isn't a reason though a business has their HQ in a location. Austin and Atlanta are both of those things as well and the recruiting for top talent is a lot easier there. Not saying Walmart will change anything, however, if Walmart is changing the relationship with their workforce to one based on performance rather than long term employment, and is constantly turning people over, there is going to be significant discontent among the workers because there aren't replacement jobs for these workers to take in NWA.

People won't want to take the risk to coming to NWA and be stuck with nowhere else to go. People will resent it significantly when they can't find employment, can't pay their mortgage, and lose their house. That's a recipe for bankruptcy. Arvest isn't going to be cutting anyone slack on that, I don't care how many mortgages they own.

Whereas in larger cities where there are other opportunities when a layoff happens, or when people need to find other opportunities that fit their skill set better, they can move on relatively easily. In the absence of other opportunities an employer increases the chances that a worker will never leave, they will price that worker out of the job market, further cementing that the worker will never leave on their own. Tenured workers after a certain point are twice as expensive and no more productive than a new worker. It's not mean, it's just a fact.

As long as Arvest holds half the mortgages in the region, WMT isn't going anywhere.

RiILZET-gmf you must be in real estate and fear for your job. just because the landscape is beautiful doesn’t mean the job market is. about all you will be relocating in is indians. did someone say the west coast is the place to be? no. you want to relocate people TX is where people are going. austin, houston area not to mention n. tx. is booming. maybe you should rethink your job possibilities

We are consistently voted top places to live. I work with relocating families and can tell you they are thrilled to get out of the large metropolitan cities and to a place that has excellent schools, low crime, arts, lakes, trails and more. You need to close your laptop, turn off your phone and walk outside and take a look around. Nothing but growth happening here. And laying off 1,000 WalMart associates isn't going to change anything. I am sorry for those that will lose their jobs. Lots of us have had to reinvent our careers. It can be done. This is an amazing place to live and raise a family. Go ahead and head out to the West coast if you think that's where it's happening. Let us all know how it is living in your 700 square foot $500,000 house.

10 years ago young people might have stayed in nwa but with all the layoffs you will see them staying a year at the longest and leaving. Young people are not happy getting no promotion, thousand dollar raise and multiple heads of “ghost work” from laid off, well compensated senior employees. Walmart offers a bad deal

The last poster is absolutely correct wmt needs to move to where the Talent is. Arkansas has some of the highest tax rates in the country except for property, which smart young people don’t want to buy anyway in nwa.

Some of you are very naive. Buying a parcel of land means nothing. There is empty land all over NWA! Starting a bidding process means nothing.

Don't fool yourself, if it becomes clear that the cost to recruit talent to NWA is more costly than moving to an area with a better, younger, more educated, limitless talent pool, it would make sense to have a HQ in that area(s). Why do you think Amazon is starting a second HQ location?

You all need to be better students of cost control and innovation. What typically is the largest cost to an employer? Labor. What can make or break companies whose future depends on innovation? Labor. Walmart would be smart to do whatever they can in the interest of both those things, whatever that may be.

They've already purchased land and began bidding for the new home office theyre building in Bentonville within the next 5-7 years. Not moving anytime soon.

It's just a matter of time before the consolidated headquarters of the "Walmart Holdings" company moves out of Bentonville. Let's be clear about this - to keep up the pace and track they are on, they have to move. How many more companies will Walmart purchase? And all those companies are going to be controlled out of Bentonville? Are you kidding me? You think all those executives and managers are going to move to Bentonville from New Jersey or California? Besides, once Mark becomes head of Walmart, he's going to move HO out of Bentonville, anyway. If he doesn't, then he's an idiot,

What these HR people don’t realize is that eventually they will be asked to close the door...from outside.

I understand what you’re saying about the job skippers. But it feels like the new leadership is blaming the company’s failings on the NWA talent pool.

If that’s true, how long until they move HQ?

Maybe another country where they seem to be looking to expand and already outsource work to like India.

In the 1980s, there were many editorials in business rags about the hicks in Arkansas not knowing how to run a business and didn't know what they were doing. There were about 300 stores then. It really is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. When given a chance and motivation, people can become experts beyond what anyone would have expected. This comes from developing people, not hiring job skippers.

Frankly there isn't close to enough people with the brains nor mentality in NWA to compete with any top 10 city. People here wouldn't be making half as much money in than they are now in an actual talent pool like New York. Walmart is still very much run the Arkansas way hence the terrible decision making by leaders over the last 10 years. They have missed every significant trend in retail. Fortunately Walmart is big enough to survive in spite of itself. I don't see why they would continue to keep there main office and brain power in Arkansas.