Chewy’s 200 Job Cuts Did Not End at the Office

Chewy confirmed more than 200 corporate job cuts in November 2023 after a surprise quarterly profit. Three years later the online pet retailer makes more money, serves more customers, and still runs a smaller payroll.

The Chewy layoff hit dual headquarters in Plantation, Florida, and Boston, plus offices in Minneapolis and Bellevue. It arrived two weeks after the board signed off on a PetSmart-related merger, and it proved to be the start of a smaller staff, not a one-time tidy-up.

Chewy Cut More Than 200 Corporate Jobs After a Surprise Profit

Chewy told staff the reductions crossed several sites and put the count north of 200. It did not publish a role-by-role list. People inside the company described cuts in human resources, recruiting, and data and business intelligence, including directors and at least one vice president, with engineers, product managers, and supply-chain staff also named on workplace forums.

WHERE THE 2023 OFFICE CUTS LANDED

• Plantation, Florida: The southern headquarters took part of a reduction Chewy said spanned multiple locations.
• Boston: The other headquarters was in the same round, alongside Minneapolis and Bellevue offices.
• Functions named internally: HR, recruiting, and data and business intelligence, plus some engineering, product, and supply-chain roles the company did not confirm.
• Pay on the way out: Workers on discussion boards said the package started at a month of severance, with extra weeks by tenure. Chewy did not confirm that math.

The timing sat awkwardly against the books. Chewy had just posted second-quarter 2023 financial results that showed a profit of 4 cents a share on $2.78 billion in sales. Active customers had slipped from 20.49 million a year earlier to 20.39 million, a drop of 100,000 people on a base that had stopped compounding.

As we head into 2024, we took the opportunity to consolidate some of our headcount and align our efforts into priorities which we believe will gain us the most significant customer wins and generate the highest business returns, to enable us to strengthen the company’s future.

Diane Pelkey, Chewy spokesperson

Chief executive Sumit Singh had already told investors that shoppers were turning “more discernible,” trading wet food and treats for cheaper dry food as inflation worked through the pet aisle. The customer stall was real. The 200 jobs were how the company chose to answer it.

The Board Approved a PetSmart Merger in Late October

On October 30, 2023, 15 days before the layoff became public, Chewy’s board approved a downstream merger with the holding company through which BC Partners had controlled both Chewy and PetSmart. In parallel, BC Partners closed a sale of PetSmart. A later stockholder suit said the structure let the sponsor sell the stores and push related tax risk toward Chewy, with indemnities, a five-year sunset on super-voting stock, and a PetSmart pharmacy transfer offered as sweeteners.

The parties later agreed to a $29.5 million cash payment to Chewy to resolve that derivative case, subject to the Delaware Court of Chancery. The payment was a settlement of claims, not a finding that the merger was unfair, and Chewy stockholders were not slated to receive a direct check.

BC Partners still sits on the vote. Chewy’s 2026 proxy listed 232,505,429 Class A shares and 176,478,229 Class B shares on the May record date. Class B carries ten votes a share. That block is about 88.4% of total voting power if it votes as one, which is how a controlled company stays controlled after the stores are gone. That control is why Chewy still lives with an acquisition overhang on the pet retailer even as it files as a public company.

THE JOB AND OWNERSHIP CALENDAR

1. March 2015: A BC Partners-led group buys PetSmart for $8.7 billion.
2. 2017: PetSmart buys Chewy for $3.35 billion.
3. June 2019: Chewy goes public; the sponsor keeps the voting stock.
4. June 3, 2023: Warehouse closures take effect in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania (522 jobs) and McCarran, Nevada (306 jobs), after spring WARN notices.
5. October 30, 2023: The board approves the downstream merger; PetSmart is sold in parallel.
6. November 2023: Chewy confirms more than 200 corporate job cuts.
7. March 12, 2025: A Texas WARN notice lists 674 jobs at the Dallas fulfillment hub, with cuts to start May 10, 2025.
8. September 9, 2026: Chewy reports $80.5 million in quarterly net income and 21.7 million active customers.

The office round in November was the first cut that reached headquarters functions. The warehouses had already been shrinking.

Headcount Stopped Growing After Those Cuts

Year-end employee counts compiled by MacroTrends show a company that stopped replacing people. The annual total peaked at 21,300 in 2022, fell to 19,400 in 2023, and then drifted to 18,000 in 2025 and 18,000 in 2026. From 2023 to 2026 that is 1,400 fewer jobs, or about 7.2%.

CHEWY YEAR-END EMPLOYEES

The 2023 drop includes the warehouse closures in Pennsylvania and Nevada as well as the November office round, so the 200 corporate jobs are only a slice of that year’s decline. What did not happen after Pelkey’s “agile and disciplined” line is a restaffing. The count flattened near 18,000 and stayed there.

Dallas Lost 674 Warehouse Jobs Next

The next large public filing was not another headquarters memo. Chewy notified the Texas Workforce Commission in March 2025 that it would cut 674 jobs at the Dallas fulfillment hub at 7243 Grady Niblo Road, a 663,000-square-foot building it opened in 2018. The notice put the start around May 10, 2025, running through June 25. The site was to keep running at a much lower capacity, not to shut.

That single warehouse round was more than three times the November 2023 office cut. It also fit a pattern already visible on Singh’s earnings calls: more volume through automated buildings, fewer people on the floor. By 2026 the company said 50% of shipping volume moved through automated fulfillment centers. National layoff tallies for 2025 folded the Dallas reduction in as a several-hundred-job retail-warehouse cut, which is how a “customer wins” office realignment shows up two years later in a different building and a different state.

Customers Came Back and the Headcount Did Not

The 2023 stall in active customers did not last. By the quarter ended August 2, 2026, Chewy counted 21.7 million active customers, up 3.8% year over year and 1.31 million above the 20.39 million print that had worried the 2023 tape. Net sales in that quarter were $3.33 billion, against $2.78 billion in the quarter that preceded the office cuts.

THE QUARTER BEFORE THE CUTS VS THE LATEST PRINT

Sales in that later quarter were 19.8% higher than the $2.78 billion print. Customers were higher too. Staff was not. Autoship customer sales reached $2.82 billion, 84.6% of the quarter, and rose 9.3%, which is the recurring base Chewy now leans on instead of a fatter recruiting bench. Net sales per active customer were $602, up 1.9% as reported.

Some of the customer add was bought, not hired. Chewy closed a $400 million purchase of Modern Animal, a veterinary clinic group, and folded in SmartPak, an equine retailer. Sequential net adds in the quarter were 208,000, including 43,000 SmartPak customers. The company is paying for health clinics and a horse-feed catalog while still describing headcount as a line to manage.

What Chewy’s Latest Quarter Shows About Those Cuts

On September 9, 2026, Chewy posted net sales of $3.33 billion, up 7.3%, or 5.7% excluding SmartPak and Modern Animal. Gross margin held at 30.4%. Adjusted EBITDA was $226.7 million, a 6.8% margin, up 90 basis points. Adjusted diluted earnings were $0.36. Singh used the print to lift full-year sales guidance to $13.46 billion to $13.57 billion, growth of 6.8% to 7.7%, and to set adjusted EBITDA margin at 6.7% to 6.8%.

Q2 FISCAL 2026 IN FOUR FIGURES

• Sales: $3.33 billion, at the high end of the company’s own range, with organic growth of 5.7%.
• Recurring mix: Autoship customers accounted for 84.6% of sales, at $2.82 billion.
• Overhead: Non-GAAP SG&A was $612 million, 18.4% of sales against 19.1% a year earlier, 70 basis points of leverage.
• Cash returned: Chewy bought back $200 million of stock, 9.9 million shares, and still held $612 million in cash with more than $1 billion of available liquidity.

Finance chief Christopher Deppe told the call that the 70 basis points of SG&A leverage came from better use of fulfillment centers, a lower variable cost to serve, disciplined headcount management, and other productivity gains. He also said essentially all of the margin beat versus the company’s own forecast came from timing and one-off items, including about $10 million of tariff-related timing. The consumer, he said, had not gotten better; treats were softer than core food. Guidance assumes that backdrop holds rather than improves.

Chewy delivered a strong second quarter, with growth of 7.3% to $3.33 billion of net sales at the high end of our guidance, and a 6.8% Adj. EBITDA margin, exceeding our expectations.

Sumit Singh, Chief Executive Officer, second-quarter 2026 results

That is a different letter than Pelkey’s 2023 note, written on a bigger customer base and a fatter profit line. The staffing idea underneath it is the same one: keep the roster tight and put the savings in the margin.

Automation Now Covers Work the Company Stopped Staffing

Singh said AI work is moving from experiments to a number on the P&L. Chewy expects savings in the low tens of millions of dollars in fiscal 2026, scaling to about $50 million on an annualized basis in fiscal 2027. An assistant named Kai was already resolving about 30% of self-service chats on orders, accounts, and Autoship. Voice agents named Kali were taking clinic scheduling. Those tools sit on top of the automated warehouses that now handle half of shipments.

The margin story Chewy now sells is that mix: Autoship on one side, fewer people and more machines on the other. Traders still price the equity as a slower-growth retailer, which is a separate fight. The labor fight is already on the income statement. A company that cut more than 200 office jobs after a 4-cent profit, then cut 674 Dallas warehouse jobs, now books AI as the next durable lever in the earnings model.

It also spent $400 million on Modern Animal in a year when the 10-Q still treated clinic revenue as a small slice of sales, and it took on term-loan debt to match. That is a choice to buy a health business rather than rebuild the recruiting bench that 2023 thinned out. The 200 people who left the Florida, Boston, Minneapolis, and Bellevue offices were the first to live with that choice. The Dallas hub was the second.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Chewy File a WARN Notice for the November 2023 Office Cuts?

No. Federal WARN rules kick in for a plant closing or a mass layoff at a single site, which is why the Mechanicsburg, McCarran, and Dallas rounds show up in state filings and the November 2023 office round does not. Those 200-plus jobs were spread across at least four cities, so the public record is Chewy’s own confirmation, not a 60-day state notice.

How Does Chewy Count Autoship Sales?

Autoship customer sales are not only the scheduled refill boxes. Chewy counts every dollar from a customer who had an Autoship order ship in the prior 364 days, including one-off add-on purchases those same people make. That is why the mix can sit at 84.6% of net sales even though plenty of those dollars are not on a standing order.

When Did Chewy Go Public, and Who Still Holds the Votes?

Chewy listed in June 2019 after PetSmart’s 2017 purchase. BC Partners kept the high-vote Class B stock through the split from PetSmart. As of the May 13, 2026 record date the Class B line was 176,478,229 shares at ten votes each, about 88.4% of the vote if that block moves together, even though the economic stake has been sold down over time.

What Did the 2023 Warehouse Closures Do That the Office Cuts Did Not?

The Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, notice covered 522 jobs and the McCarran, Nevada, notice covered 306 jobs, both listed as closures effective June 3, 2023. Those were whole buildings coming out of the network months before the corporate round. The November cuts were overhead and support roles, not a second pair of warehouse shutdowns.

Deppe still listed disciplined headcount management among the reasons overhead fell as a share of sales in the August quarter. Chewy has not announced another headquarters round to sit beside that line.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of Chewy’s 2023 job cuts and later results, and it is for information only. It is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell CHWY or any other security, and not legal advice about WARN notices, severance, or the Delaware settlement. Readers who are considering a stock, a claim, or an employment decision should consult a licensed financial adviser, an employment lawyer, or another qualified professional who can review their own facts. Headcount, sales, customer, and case figures are those published by Chewy, MacroTrends, state WARN filings, and court papers as of the dates cited, and they can change with later filings.