Walmart, the largest private employer in America, has made the difficult decision to lay off more than a thousand employees at the corporate level.

Walmart employs around 2.1 million people, with more than half of those being in stores, and the rest in corporate positions.

Walmart wants it known that these layoffs are in no way linked to the latest tariffs in place on foreign goods. A spokesperson for the company told the Wall Street Journal that the layoffs are related to the company’s “business priorities” and “growth strategy” and are not a result of tariffs.

An official memo from Walmart CEO and President John Furner reads (via USA Today):

“These changes are mainly focused on driving efficiency in the End-to-End Operations teams, ensuring we’re serving them so they can best serve our customers.”

It has to be a hard pill to swallow for the 1,500 Walmart employees getting the axe. More commonly, layoffs happen when a business is struggling to make profits and needs to increase its bottom line.

But when Walmart’s profits are as high as they are — $681 billion dollars in 2024 — it’s hard to understand why they would need to trim back to such a degree.

A Reddit thread titled “Walmart blood bath” has some interesting insight on what is happening at the giant retailer.

According to some comments, it was not too long ago that Walmart made some of the same corporate employees who just got laid off not only return to office, but relocate to their headquarters in Arkansas.

“What sucks is that last year, they were forced to relocate to Arkansas or leave Walmart. Imagine moving your whole family, only to get laid off anyway,” one commenter notes.

Another points out that a return-to-office mandate is essentially a soft layoff: “RTO was a soft layoff without announcing layoff so they did twice already.”

That commenter might be onto something, as there is research to back what they claim According to Bamboo HR, 25 percent of senior executives hoped that employees would quit due to an order to return to the office.