Big business. How about it.
In Australia’s glorious supermarket duopoly, Woolworths has been finding itself a little bit up against it, as chief rival Coles moves from strength-to-strength.
The supermarket giant, which has been attempting to reinvent and diversify its business with a series of worker-focused ‘Woolworths Metro‘ mini-stores in business areas and CBDs, has announced that they will slash 500 jobs from its operations, and close down a solid handful of underperforming stores in a restructure of the company that is set to cost in the vicinity of $1billion.
In addition, the company has separated Big W from online retalier Ezybuy, which is fuelling speculation that corporate HQ is preparing to flog off at least the latter all quick-like.
The 500 jobs that are on the chopping block are largely from Woolies’ support office and supply chain, whilst an additional 1,000 jobs will reportedly be moved “directly into our businesses to improve accountability and help us better support our store teams and customers,” which is a marvellous piece of vague corporate doublespeak.
Freshly installed chief executive Brad Banducci confirmed the move in a statement issued earlier today.
“Today’s announcement demonstrates both the progress we are making and our absolute commitment to act quickly to rebuild the business by doing the right thing by our customers, shareholders, team and suppliers.”
The restructure will also see a total of 27 stores closed – 21 in Australia, 6 in New Zealand – that have been identified as either loss-making or in the bottom quartile.
A further 34 underperforming stores have been identified in a company-wide review of operations.
No word on exactly when the stores will close, but Woolies asserted it would occur before the end of their lease terms.
The cost of closing the stores will scan up to a cool $344million.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald.
Photo: Quinn Rooney/Getty.
