Walmart to hire 40,000 holiday workers vs. 150,000 in 2021

Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss Walmart's holiday hiring plans and what they signal about the upcoming key shopping season.

Video transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

BRAD SMITH: Welcome back, everyone. It is time for Cut for Time, three stories, one minute each. Let's start with this today. Walmart announced it's going to hire 40,000 seasonal workers for this year's holiday season, a sizable decrease from the 150,000 that it hired in 2021. This plan coming after the retail giant warned of a smaller annual profit and as it navigates a slowing economy.

You're seeing shares of Walmart, WMT, up higher on the day by about 1.9%. It is notable, the decrease year over year there, for certain. And that directly correlated to perhaps some of the wage increases that have taken place from this year versus last year. But then additionally, the number of customers that they're going to continue to interface with, I think that's notable because Walmart, of course, does have the grocery category that gets most customers in stores. But then it's also, during the holiday season, the ability to deliver on so many of the e-commerce orders that they see come through as well.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, so it's a little confusing here that we are seeing this. Are they going to see that much of a decrease in demand that was different from last year? I mean, the other question is, Walmart, for many years, was sort of plagued by the idea that if you went into a store, it was tough to find a sales person if you did need help. So you wonder, are we to see the return of those types of complaints? And is that going to have an effect on sales? But this is really dramatic that it's only 40,000 instead of 150,000.

BRAD SMITH: It is.

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