SWEDEN (Commonwealth Union) – It looks like H&M is making some serious changes to their employee numbers. It was early this week that the Swedish fashion giant made the statement that they will be starting layoffs which will amount to about 1500 employees being made redundant.
H&M had made it very clear to the press that they are doing this because they cannot afford to keep the jobs open. They are not retailing as much as they used to in stores as people have started online shopping more.
Online shopping became a huge hit during the pandemic. Although online shopping existed far before COVID came about, when people had no other option than online shopping amid the global health crisis, the ecommerce platforms began to grow in leaps and bounds. However, with this happening, people stopped visiting the physical stores unless it was a necessity. A lot of high-end brands closed down a lot of their location and has only one or two locations available in busy cities.
This meant that jobs became redundant as physical locations closed down. Against this backdrop, H&M came out and stated that there will be massive job cuts due to several reasons, the main one being that they have more online sales than at the physical store.
The question here is if this would this affect the consumer once the jobs are made redundant. If the consumer continues the lifestyle of online shopping, then probably not, particularly since there is artificial intelligence helping the shopper every step of the way to make the purchases they need.
Of course, there is the inconvenience of not having an H&M close by to you in case you wanted to nip down quickly and buy a garment of your choice. But of course, these problems will all be sorted with overnight shipping.
