Macy’s furloughs a majority of their workforce with 130,000 workers.
Macy’s announced it’s furloughing most of its workforce, including nearly 130,000 employees. Workers will continue to receive health benefits until the end of May 2020.
“Across Macy’s, Bloomingdales, and Bluemercury [beauty] brands, we will be moving to the absolute minimum workforce needed to maintain basic operations,” the retailer said Monday.
Since March 18, all of Macy’s closed their stories. The company says they will stay closed “until we have [a] clear line of sight on when it is safe to reopen.” That said, their online retail business is still open, but the company said they lost a majority of their sales due to store closures.
The company also said it had taken steps to “maintain financial flexibility.” These steps include suspending their stock dividend, using credit, freezing hiring, and spending. Macy’s also said the company is “evaluating all other financing options.”
Macy’s was struggling long before the Coronavirus COVID-19 economic shutdown. Last February, Macy’s announced plans to close over 100 stores over the next three years and cutting approximately 2,000 jobs.
Nearly 3.3 million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, a number that broke records going back over 50 years.
In relevant news, Wall Street economists forecast things will get worse in the future.
Ian Shepherdson, a chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, says things will get worse. “We now guesstimate that second-quarter GDP will drop at a 10% annualized rate, after a 2% fall in Q1,” said Ian Shepherdson, said in a note to clients last Monday. His forecast suggests consumer spending will decrease in the next few months. “We are becoming more pessimistic about the near-term economic outlook,” Shepherdson says.