Kmart to Cut 170 Jobs at Two Locations

The odds are good that you have at least seen a K-mart before, but in case you live in an area of the country that is not serviced by one of these large-scale discount retailers and you do not keep an eye on retail mergers the company is owned by the Sears holding company. For those of you not familiar with the idea here is a look at how the company describes itself, “Sears Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ: SHLD) is a leading integrated retailer with over 3,900 full-line and specialty retail stores in the United States and Canada…   We are the nation’s largest provider of home services, with more than 11 million service calls made annually and have a long-established commitment to those who serve in the military through initiatives like the Heroes at Home program. We have been named the 2011 Mobile Retailer of the Year, Recipient of the 2012 ENERGY STAR® “Corporate Commitment Award” for Product Retailing and Energy Management and one of Top 20 Best Places to Work for Recent Grads.  Sears Holdings Corporation operates through its subsidiaries, including Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Kmart Corporation.

While the company, and its parent company, may both be very large this does not insulate them from the layoffs that have been sweeping retailers all over the nation.  As more and more companies deal with slumping sales, as consumers are generally able to spend less of discretionary items, they are turning to cutting staffers in order to compensate and keep their profits margins up.

In this case however it is not just the layoffs to come, it is more of an overall restucrting of how the company works. The already discounted retailer is getting ready to change some of its stores into liquidation centers, where customers can get an even deeper discount. All in all the company is going to be letting go of about 170 workers from two different locations.

80 of the workers will be cut from a store in Hollywood and another 91 will be cut from a location in Pembroke Pines. This means that each of these changes is enough by itself to qualify as a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “…mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” This means that the company is going to have to give the workers at least some time to find new work before they move onto the unemployment rolls.

The layoff notices officially went out on the 18^th of May and the layoffs are expected to go into effect near the end of July. The newly converted liquidation centers will run at reduced hours, with reduced staffing.