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With unemployment on the rise and the economy struggling, the country’s retail industry has taken a severe hit. Since many people are either without work or afraid of losing their jobs, spending on unnecessary consumer goods in down. This means that there are now fewer employment opportunities in the industry. Because of this, major department giant Macy recently announced that it will be doing away with 600 retail jobs in Florida when it closes its headquarters in Miami.

Although it will be closing up shop at its area headquarters, a representative of the company has stated that Miami will continue to house one of its eight regional offices. Only 35 to 40 executives are expected to remain in the area for the tasks needed to run this part of Macy’s operations.

Headquarters won’t be the only area of business affected. The company will also be decreasing the number of workers at both Macy’s stores and Bloomingdale’s department stores as part of a massive restructuring of its central operations. As a result, jobs in Florida won’t be the only ones to receive the ax.

According to a Macy’s spokesperson, the company plans to cut a total of 7,000 jobs across the nation. This translates to roughly 4 percent of their staff. At this time, approximately 180,000 people work for the retail giant. Not all of the jobs will actually result in another person claming unemployment. In some cases, the company will simply close gaps by not refilling already vacant payroll positions.

Some of the largest job cuts are expected to take place at Macy’s West headquarters in San Francisco, where approximately 1,400 people will be laid off. Another area that will lose a good number of employment opportunities is the company’s Central headquarters in Atlanta. The city, where unemployment reached 7 percent in November of last year, will lose somewhere around 850 jobs.

By eliminating these positions, Macy’s hopes to decrease their expenses by somewhere around $400 million a year as of 2010. Since many of the national cut backs will take place this year, the company has predicted that it will save $250 million during 2009.

At this time, Miami’s jobless rate is only slightly below the national average of 7.2 percent at 7 percent. Other industries in the area are also suffering. During the course of 2008 many customer service and call center positions were outsourced and the construction sector saw a large decline. The latter was mostly the result of a real estate market saturated with too many properties and foreclosures. Because of this, there was little need to start new building projects.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 10:05 pm and is filed under job search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.