By Emily Kaiser in The Economy Sucks
Tuesday, Jan. 27 2009 @ 4:13PM
Not even our precious and seemingly invincible Target is free from layoffs. Target Corporation announced layoffs to employees this morning at their Minneapolis headquarters, WCCO reported. Now we have the details from Target officials.
The cuts affect 9 percent of their workforce at headquarter locations. This includes about 600 layoffs and eliminating 400 open positions primarily in the Twin Cities. The majority of these changes are effective today.
Target will also close its Little Rock, Ark. distribution center later this year. The center currently employs 500 people. More details below.
Target headquarter employees responded to the layoffs, saying they were surprised by the announcement.
More from the Target announcement: "The company has recently undertaken other actions to manage expense and capital investment and minimize the number of affected employees. These actions include suspending salary increases for senior management, suspending share repurchase activity, tightening credit card underwriting and credit granting, implementing initiatives to improve store productivity, reducing planned new store openings, and cutting outside contractor support, travel, entertainment and other headquarters operating expenses.
We are clearly operating in an unprecedented economic environment that requires us to make some extremely difficult decisions to ensure Target remains competitive over the long-term," said Gregg Steinhafel, President and CEO of Target Corporation.
Headquarters employees affected by the announcement will continue to receive their full pay and benefits through April 1, after which they will receive a comprehensive separation package based on their years of service.
As part of that package, Target also will provide these employees with 12 months of continued Target health care benefits in addition to 12 months COBRA benefit, and outplacement support to assist them in transitioning to their next position. Little Rock distribution center employees will be offered positions at other Target distribution centers, or will receive comparable severance.
According to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal, "the company's same-store sales fell 4.1 percent in December, following a decline of 10.4 percent in November. In fact, the company hasn't reported a monthly same-store sales increase since last June.
-----------------------------------------------
From a blog poster:
Anonymous (not verified)
07:09 pm Jan 27
I witnessed these layoffs firsthand and can tell you there was no "pack up and don't come back."
No one who delivered this tough message took any pleasure in doing so. The standard practice for terminations at Target is to bring the person to HR, give the news, and see them out the door. No one has EVER been allowed to return to their desks to say goodbye, send a few final emails, clean their resume off the network, and generally hang out for 2 hours. It was an unprecedented gesture of fairness and compassion that I have never experienced at a large company. Add the severance package and you can see that Target is trying to be fair - most large companies do not do this.
Sure, it looks to be laid off - but I've already had one of these laid off folks playfully taunt me for he package she received, the fact that she has a 2-month paid vacation while I have to return to work.
Overall there were a lot of tears, a lot of goodbye, a lot of sincere apologies from management - who didn't even know their people were being laid off. Managers just received a list of people who were being terminated this morning, and had 15 minutes to get their stuff together before the 8:45 meeting.
Rough day.
----------------------------------------------------------
Direct links to other similar items: http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/01/target_corp_lay.php
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/01/target_corp_emp.php