On Friday, September 18, CarMax notified 145 corporate employees that their positions were eliminated, effective the same day. It’s the company’s third layoff round in under 11 months: 350 jobs in October 2025, 230 in January 2026, and now 145, for a cumulative 725.
Technology took the biggest hit
Nearly half the cut, roughly 60 positions, sat in the Richmond, Virginia headquarters area, with the rest split across Dallas, Atlanta, and CarMax’s Edmunds subsidiary in California. Almost every role eliminated was salaried. Technology absorbed the largest single share at around 60 of the 145 positions, with the remainder spread across HR, product, accounting, and marketing. The company’s statement read: “We have made the difficult decision to reduce our corporate office staffing by approximately 145 associates to support our strategic priorities and operate with a leaner corporate workforce.” Affected employees stopped working immediately but stay on payroll through October 2, with severance on top.
The cuts landed against a quarter that wasn’t weak. CarMax’s most recent results, for fiscal Q1 2027, showed net revenue of $8.01 billion, up 6.2%, with combined retail and wholesale used-vehicle unit sales at 392,357, up 3.3%. Net earnings fell to $185.6 million, down 11.8% from $210.4 million a year earlier, and total gross profit dropped 4.4% to $854.4 million. CEO Keith Barr, who took over in March, has named “running lean” one of four strategic priorities, with a target of $200 million in exit-rate SG&A savings by the end of fiscal 2027. Barr’s own framing: “Our goal is clear: deliver strong unit sales and earnings growth that enables us to consistently reward our shareholders.” A CarMax spokesperson added a second framing on top of that: “These changes will help us move faster and create better alignment across teams.” “Faster” and “leaner” are doing different work in that pairing. One is about speed to market. The other is about cost. Whether they’re actually the same lever, or whether CarMax found a convenient word to describe two different problems, is the kind of distinction that tends to surface on an earnings call, not in a press statement.
Verizon’s cuts were a choice. CarMax’s are a defense.
LostJobs covered Verizon’s layoffs on August 17: a quarter with record adjusted EBITDA, north of $13 billion, alongside cumulative headcount reductions past 16,600. CarMax runs the opposite direction. This isn’t a record quarter funding a voluntary cut. Revenue is climbing while margin erodes, and corporate headcount is the lever that moves fastest when a management team needs to defend earnings without waiting on the top line to cooperate.
The structure itself, cutting heads as one lever among several, is one LostJobs flagged at Kroger on September 11: Kroger’s CEO named headcount reduction as the third of four savings sources on an earnings call, with no number attached, only a direction. CarMax skipped that step and went straight to a figure: 145 people, about 4% of corporate staff, tied to a $200 million savings target due by the end of fiscal 2027. The word choice differs, CarMax says “leaner,” Kroger said “more efficient,” but the structure repeats: name headcount as a savings lever on the call, then defer the number, then land it in the next disclosure.
CarMax’s $200 million target by fiscal 2027 sits inside a familiar shape this year. Campbell’s set a $500 million savings program running through fiscal 2030 when it cut 13% of its salaried workforce in September. Both numbers come with a denominator and a year attached, which is more than Kroger offered when it named headcount as a lever without a figure. CarMax’s timeline is also the shortest of the three: a fiscal 2027 deadline gives the company about eighteen months to hit its number, against Campbell’s four-year runway.
The labor read
Nearly 40% of the 145 roles cut were technology positions, and that ratio is worth isolating on its own. CarMax is tying the cuts to a faster car-shopping experience, and Barr’s own background, overseeing digital reservation systems at a hospitality company, points toward a specific read: the company isn’t cutting its technology investment, it’s cutting technology headcount, aiming to run the same digital product roadmap with fewer people building it. That’s a different shape than the “AI replaces support staff” story that dominates most 2026 layoff coverage. Nothing in CarMax’s statement names AI or automation. But shipping the same or more digital product with a smaller technology team is exactly what efficiency tooling looks like once it’s live inside an organization, whether or not the press release uses the word.
CarMax reports its next quarter on September 29, the first earnings call where the post-cut management team faces analyst questions directly. At Kroger, the “direction now, number later” sequence resolved a month out at an October investor day with a concrete target. CarMax has already put its number on the table: $200 million, by fiscal 2027’s end. What’s worth tracking on the 29th is whether revenue and margin start converging again after this round of cuts. If revenue keeps climbing on the 29th while margin keeps falling, “leaner” is a word with a bigger round still unannounced behind it.
