Walmart is the largest employer on earth and they just cut about a thousand corporate jobs in product, design, and tech. The internal memo was co-signed by the exec who runs “AI acceleration.” The memo somehow forgot to mention AI. They called it “platform consolidation,” which is the new corporate way of saying we bought software that does your job and we’re hoping you don’t read the news.
The tell is what they’re still hiring for. Cashiers. Stockers. Warehouse pickers. The salaried middle gets the slide deck and a flight to Bentonville if they want to reapply for their own job; the hourly floor gets a name tag and a schedule that changes every week. That’s not a hiring strategy, that’s a sorting machine. Either you’re cheap enough that automating you isn’t worth the engineering hours, or you’re gone. Walmart is showing every other Fortune 500 the new shape of the company, and the shape is a barbell with no middle.
The thing that keeps me up is how unembarrassed everyone is about it. Five years ago a company this big would have lied to employees first and shareholders second. Now they brag to the analysts and email the layoffs as a footnote. The good news, if you can find it, is that nobody outside the C-suite is buying the spin anymore. Everyone laid off this year knows exactly what happened to them. That’s not solidarity yet, but it’s the only soil it ever grows in.