Best Buy Gives $500 Bonuses and Lays Off 5,000 Employees Within 2 Days
Earlier this week we were told that hourly employees at Best Buy were being given up to $500 with their "gratitude bonus". But then, just 2 days later, the Minnesota-based company announced that they had laid off 5,000 employees. It went from great news from the company to bad news very quickly this week.
Let's get the bad news out of the way first. Bring Me the News writes that Best Buy announced they had laid off 5,000 employees recently. Most of the employees laid off were full-time. This announcement was made this morning (Thursday morning) by CEO Corie Barry during an earnings call.
Also during that call, the CEO announced they are hiring about 2,000 more part-time employees. So that's good news! More good news: full-time hourly workers will be getting a $500 bonus and part-time hourly employees will get a $200 bonus (as long as they were employed as of February 15th). They're also offering all employees paid-time-off in order to get the COVID vaccine. All full-time employees get 8 hours and part-time employees get 4 hours.
It was also announced that they are speeding up the process of closing some of their stores. Their Q4 reports were not what was expected. Plus, we don't know what's going to happen to the work-from-home technology demand with more and more people getting the vaccine. It could mean even lower sales numbers for Best Buy if people are returning to work and don't need to spend as much on work-from-home equipment.
With Best Buy closing locations, it makes me wonder if there will eventually be no physical Best Buy stores and it will all be online. Speaking of stores that no longer exist, if you keep scrolling you can see 15 iconic retail stores that don't exist anymore.