Macy’s Chief Growth Officer Forced Out After 34 Years

After working with the company for 34 years, Macy’s Chief Growth Officer Peter Sachse is being forced to move along.

Sachse, who was in the position for just under a year, has his last day at the end of this month with a send-off package of $12 million, with $4.5 million of that in cash, around $1.3 million in restricted shares and $6.7 million in retirement benefits. He is the third-highest-paid executive at the company, with $900,000 as his salary, right behind Macy’s Chairman and CEO Terry Lundgren and President and soon CEO Jeff Gennette.

All of this is according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed last week. However, he is not alone in this layoff: Macy’s is getting rid of more than 10,000 other posts within the company. Arguably, they likely will not get the same sendoff that Sachse will.

The main reason behind the layoffs: Fewer of Macy’s stores are in operation, and the retailer didn’t end up having as fruitful of a holiday shopping season as it had hoped. Macy’s has plans to close nearly 70 stores over the next few months (many of them are in malls), with another hundred slated to shutter in a few years.

Earlier this month, Macy’s shares tanked in late trading, taking other retailers down with it. This happened immediately after it slashed its earnings outlook, adding that it would reduce its workforce by at least 4 percent.

Back in May 2016, Lundgren told his investors that Macy’s is ready to spring into a big comeback. He said he wasn’t concerned about Amazon but rather promised Macy’s would be poised for a repeat of the phoenix act it did after the 2001 recession and after the Great Recession of 2008.

Lundgren is retiring this year.