Dick’s Sporting Goods to lay off employees as retail theft cuts into profits – By Stephanie Ritenbaugh (Triblive) / Aug 22, 2023
Dick’s Sporting Goods said on Tuesday that retail theft has hurt its profits, one of the reasons the Findlay-based chain is laying off an unspecified number of employees.
“We are conducting a business optimization of our organization to better align our talent, organizational design and spending in support of our most critical strategies while also streamlining our overall cost structure,” the company said in its second quarter earnings call.. “As part of our review, we eliminated certain positions primarily at our customer support center on Aug. 21, 2023.”
Dick’s said theft and damage to merchandise was a primary factor in the weaker profit, referring to the losses as “shrink.” The other factor was weak sales in the outdoor category.
“The biggest impact in terms of the surprise for (the second quarter) primarily came from shrink,” said Navdeep Gupta, executive vice president and chief financial officer. “We thought we had adequately reserved for it. However, the number of incidents and the organized retail crime impact came in significantly higher than we anticipated, and that impacted our Q2 results as well.
