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Sears recently laid off more than 200 corporate workers as part of “ongoing restructuring,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
The layoffs “affected various business units and roles across the organization,” a Sears spokesman says in the Chicago Tribune article from Jan. 31.
Sears has been struggling for years to find ways to return to profitability, and staff cuts and store closures have been among its strategies. The latest layoffs of about 220 people are primarily at the company’s Illinois headquarters, the Chicago Tribune reports.
As part of its efforts to trim costs and improve its liquidity, the retailer has borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from CEO Edward Lampert’s investment companies and recently announced it would close an additional 103 stores by early April.
“We made significant progress in 2017 through our efforts to reset our cost base and enhance our liquidity,” Lampert says in a Jan. 10 statement. “The financial transactions we are pursuing and incremental cost actions are designed to accelerate our return to profitability.”
The retailer announced a plan to cut $1 billion in expenditures in a year in February 2017, which it later updated to $1.25 billion in May. According to the Chicago Tribune article, the company successfully cut $1.25 billion in the last year.
