Carvana, an online automotive retailer, reportedly laid off thousands of workers this week en masse via Zoom.
Blaming a "recession" in auto sales, Carvana on Tuesday let go of about 2,500 employees, roughly 12% of its workforce, CBS News reported. The move comes weeks after the company posted a $506 million loss in the first quarter.
Many workers who lost their jobs are upset about the way the company handled the layoffs.
According to reports, Carvana sent out a company-wide email Tuesday morning about the impending job cuts, but it did not specifying who would be affected. The email caused "mass hysteria" among workers, a now-former employee wrote on Twitter.
Later that morning, the blow was delivered during a Zoom call. A Carvana spokesperson told Protocol that "less than half" of the layoffs were conducted over Zoom and that the company "had as many conversations as we could in person."
That brings little consolation to those who learned they no longer had a job during a conference call with hundreds of colleagues.
"You just fired us in a zoom meeting and said 'have a good day' at the end. You should be ashamed," tweeted one worker who was fired. "I am so disgusted by how this was handled."
The company also sent workers an email from CEO Ernie Garcia that said most of the cuts would be in the company's operations division, according to CBS.
Jay Romero, who had worked for Carvana for more than two years in Phoenix, told CBS it was a "very scary experience" to lose a job without any direct contact from a supervisor.
"I had no support from anybody — no management, no team leads," he said. "One of Carvana's slogans is 'Treat customers as you would treat your own mom,' and we didn't get treated that way as employees."
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Carvana said impacted team members would receive four weeks of pay plus an additional week for every year they were with the company. It also said the executive team is foregoing their salaries for the remainder of the year to help contribute to the severance pay for departing team members.
The layoffs came the same day that Carvana announced it spent $2.2 billion to buy auction business ADESA U.S.
“Despite the recent industry slowdown, Carvana continues to grow and deliver exceptional experiences to an increasing number of customers," Garcia said in a statement announcing the acquisition. "We aim to use this ADESA U.S. alignment to both improve the experiences of the ADESA U.S. physical auction customers and to focus on significant and sustainable efficiencies, and unit economic improvements, for Carvana to catapult back into rapid profitable growth as the industry inevitably rebounds."
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