Neiman Marcus, the RealReal Cutting Jobs

• Layoffs have started to seep into the retail sector, mostly affecting corporate employees.
• Neiman Marcus, Everlane, Wayfair and others have cut jobs since the beginning of the year.
• Still, few retailers are laying off store employees as the trend of “labor hoarding” continues in 2023.

The layoffs have officially hit retail.

Since early 2023, major retailers, ranging from department stores to direct-selling brands, have shed staff, the latest move in a sector hit hard by labor woes and inflation.

Most of the cuts so far have affected employees in retail companies. At the store level, many retailers are actually holding on to workers, even seasonal workers, more strictly than usual, in a practice economists call “work shorts.” Still, in less than two months of the year, nearly a dozen companies have already announced layoffs, affecting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of employees.

Here are the retailers who have announced layoffs for 2023:

• The real genuine: The luxury mail order company will cut 230 employees, about 7% of its workforce
• Neiman Markus: The high-end department store is cutting 5% of staff as part of a “strategic realignment to accelerate growth of high-value luxury customers.”
• stitch fix: About 20% of the brand’s 1,700 employees were laid off in January due to declining sales and a shrinking customer base.

• Everlane: The direct-to-consumer clothing brand has shed 17% of its corporate workforce and less than 3% of its retail workforce to “improve profitability in 2023.”
• Wayfair: The online homewares retailer shed 1,750 jobs, or about 10% of its workforce, in January. The majority of the layoffs, about 1,200 positions, were for employees at the company to “eliminate and restructure layers of management to be more agile,” Wayfair said.
• Saks.com: At least 100 jobs, or about 3.5% of the workforce, have been eliminated at Saks Fifth Avenue’s e-commerce branch. Saks Off 5th’s e-commerce site also carried out layoffs, although it’s unclear how many workers were affected.
• The Bay: The e-commerce arm of Canadian department store Hudson’s Bay laid off less than 2% of its employees

• Robust: The direct-to-consumer carpet brand has cut 100 jobs at the company to better position itself for “today’s challenging economic environment,” the company says.
• Amazon: Around 18,000 employees were laid off in January, many of them focused on the e-commerce giant’s brick-and-mortar retail operations
• Zappos: More than 300 workers, or about a fifth of the workforce, were laid off as part of January’s layoffs at Amazon’s online shoe brand.