Carvana Tells Employees to Hit the Road as Company Growth Swerves

 The online car retailer known for its vehicle vending machines reportedly fired 2,500 workers this week.

Photo: Carvana

Carvana, the online car retailer, has reportedly laid off over 2,500 employees, some over Zoom, this past Tuesday according to Protocol.

According to the company’s 8-K filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, any employees that are a part of the lay offs can take advantage of four weeks of severance pay, plus one week for every year they’ve been with the company. The filing also claims that executive employees will forfeit their salary for the remainder of the calendar year to help fund severance pay.

Carvana’s shtick was to make car buying easier by doing it online. The company was founded in 2012, and broke onto the scene in the mid 2010's touting their novel car delivery business model, where users could purchase a car online and have it delivered to them, or access one of their car-vending machines. But now it seems the company has hit a few potholes.

“Recent macroeconomic factors have pushed automotive retail into recession,” a Carvana spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo this morning. “While Carvana is still growing, our growth is slower than what we originally prepared for in 2022, and we made the difficult decision to reduce the size of certain operations teams to better align with the current needs of the business.”

Chit chat on social media indicated that some of the Zoom layoffs occurred via a pre-recorded message. However, a Carvana spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that no layoffs were conducted using a pre-recorded message.

Carvana’s recent firings add to the growing wave of tech companies reducing their workforce as of recently. Celebrity shoutout service Cameo let go of 25% of it’s employees last week after a pandemic-fueled hiring spree. Last month, Netflix let go of much of its Tudum workforce less than six months after the blog was launched.