Walmart cuts 1,000 tech jobs, signaling retail support reorganization

Walmart cut or relocated about 1,000 workers across its global technology and product teams, and some of those employees were told to move to Bentonville, Arkansas, or Northern California. The company said it was trying to simplify how work was organized, reduce duplication and make ownership clearer, a signal that the next wave of retail restructuring is about more than headcount. It is about where decision-making sits, which teams stay close to headquarters and which functions get pushed out of remote and satellite offices.

The move did not come out of nowhere. In May 2025, Walmart said a restructuring of its global tech and Walmart U.S. operations would affect around 1,500 employees, including end-to-end operations teams and Walmart Connect marketing. In February 2025, the company said it would eliminate nearly 700 corporate jobs in New Jersey and North Carolina and close its Charlotte office. A year earlier, Walmart confirmed hundreds of corporate cuts and told most remote workers, along with employees in Dallas, Atlanta and Toronto, to relocate. Taken together, the pattern shows a retailer steadily concentrating support work into fewer hubs while tying more roles to in-person collaboration.

That matters at Big Lots, where the pressure on support functions has been far more dramatic. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2024 with about $3.1 billion in debt. At the start of 2024, Big Lots had 1,392 stores and more than 27,000 employees, making it the fourth-largest home goods retailer in the country by revenue, with $4.7 billion in 2023 sales. The chain first agreed to sell itself to Nexus Capital Management for $760 million, then by December 2024 said it would close all remaining stores before a rescue deal changed the course again.

That rescue came from Gordon Brothers and Variety Wholesalers, which kept hundreds of stores open and began reopening locations under new ownership. Variety Wholesalers has since reopened 219 Big Lots stores, with another 78 added in a later wave. The lesson for Big Lots employees is that corporate support work is being redrawn just as fast as store footprints are. In retail, the jobs most exposed are often the ones between the store and the spreadsheet: merchandising, pricing, inventory, marketing and IT roles that can be centralized, automated or relocated when leaders decide the chart has to get leaner.