Walmart’s office consolidation plans mean transferring or laying off 1,472 local employees at its downtown Dallas and Carrollton facilities.
The majority of employees (1,266 people) work at or remotely from the company’s Sam’s Club technology hub in the Factory Six 03 building in Downtown Dallas’ West End.
The remaining 206 jobs will be lost at a call center at 1025 W. Trinity Mills Road in Carrollton, which was part of Walmart Health, which abruptly closed its clinics in April. The Trinity Mills Road facility also employs employees separate from Walmart Health, including pharmacy-related jobs, and will remain open.
The layoffs at Sam’s Club’s technology sites will be phased in from August through the end of January, according to a letter sent to the Texas Workforce Commission. Call center employees will be paid 90 days’ pay unless they are transferred to other positions at Walmart. Employees who leave will be given severance packages.
Walmart is asking the “majority” of its technical staff working or reporting to Sam’s Club technology centers to transfer to its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, or offices in the San Francisco area and Hoboken, New Jersey.
“We do not anticipate that all affected employees will lose their jobs as a result of this incident,” Walmart said in the letter, but any employees who do not relocate or take other jobs with the company will be terminated by the end of January, the letter said.
The closure of the Sam’s Club tech hub will not affect the Sam’s Club Now store in Lower Greenville, which the tech team has been using as a lab, and a Walmart spokesman said the store will remain open.
Real Estate Vacancies
The departure of Sam’s Club Tech Hub will leave a large vacant space at the red-brick 603 Munger Street building, a historic warehouse building that has been converted into a Class A office building and was 90 percent leased before Walmart’s decision to move out.
The original lease, signed in 2018, was for 45,000 square feet. Granite Properties spent $77 million in 2017 to renovate the 215,000-square-foot building.
“Leasing is strong at Factory Six 03,” Granite Properties senior managing director Paul Bennett said in an email. “We recently renewed 32,000 square feet, expanded 8,000 square feet and added 5,600 square feet of new lease.”
Multiple Cities
Walmart said earlier this month that it would ask workers in Dallas, Atlanta and Toronto to relocate to its Bentonville headquarters, where it is building a new headquarters, as well as to larger locations in California and near New York City.
Walmart maintains a technology hub in San Francisco, but has announced new job cuts in California, including 180 jobs in Sunnyvale and 388 in San Bruno, Supermarket News reported.
No notice of relocation to Atlanta had been filed with the state of Georgia as of Friday.
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