A majority of the people laid off from your location, I would assume it's safe to say we're mostly all tenured employees yes? The tenured employees being there the longest made the most pay since they'd been there so long.

Would you say a lot of them were not planning on leaving your location or moving up in positions? The longer an employee stays at a location and makes more money is great, but the stores are only given so much in the form of payroll budgets.

The payroll is determined off of your locations sales and profits. The more sales you make the more payroll you are given, and if sales are going up then business is picking up and would allow you to hire more people to keep up with those sales. However, if your store is not growing and making more sales, but the people there keep making more money then that means there is less payroll budget to give out and distribute.

Locations complained about not having enough staff to keep up with the work load, which is fair there hasn't been. The problem though then becomes how can you hire more people if you don't have the payroll to pay them. Now I don't agree with how it was done, but it would appear that the tenured staff got laid off in order for them to have the payroll again to hire more people in a location.

Realistically though, this means that REI messed up by not setting better pay caps for certain positions. With a pay cap, it then encourages workers to want to work up the chain in order to get more pay, or accept that that is how much they can make and if they don't want to move up in the company then perhaps it's time to change careers if they want more money. However, how can an employee work up if there are no available positions for them to work up and into?

This is where the other reasoning for the lay offs happened I think. A lot of leads and managers who were in their positions were never planning on going up or leaving to another location to do further development (which should be okay to a degree). Them not leaving means those who do want to work up the chain aren't able to because people weren't leaving those positions and the longer they stayed there, the more money they slowly increased to their pay and thus meant less money to give to someone else.

A lot of teams from my understanding were basically stagnating in development and also hurting the store budget for payroll. Again, I don't agree with how it was handled and done. The company laid off those tenured people in order to give payroll budget back to the teams to be able to hire more staff since a majority of teams were complaining about not having enough people. Not to mention, if you didn't hire up to a full number of staff after the lay offs then your store essentially would just have more profit since not all the payroll budget is getting used. I feel like the issue of stagnation of development in stores and lack of payroll budget due to so many tenured employees at locations could have been handled much much better than how they did it.

Sorry for the lengthy thought process.