Nebraska-Based Online Merchant Lays Off 80-Plus Austin Workers

AUSTIN, TX — Nebraska-based Spreetail — an online merchant of home and garden products with offices on Congress Avenue — is laying off more than 100 workers, the lion's share in Austin, according to a published report.

The Lincoln Journal-Star spoke to CEO Breet Thome, who told the newspaper the company is re-focusing its efforts on inventory and fulfillment centers. The move comes after the expansion-minded firm had telegraphed a push toward more robust e-commerce offerings, as the tech newsletter Austin Inno Beat noted in its report.

It was barely in June 2018 that the company announced it would hire 100 workers in Austin within roughly a year's time while moving into a 21,000-square-foot office space near 4th and Congress streets, Austin Inno Beat reported. Now, layoff plans call for 22 cut jobs at its home base and another 86 shuttered jobs in Austin, according to the Lincoln Journal-Star.

Patch reached out to the Texas Workers Commission to learn why the agency hadn't alerted to the local layoffs as required under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, a U.S. labor law created in 1988 designed to give workers enough advance time to layoffs to accommodate alternate job searches. Patch receives such WARN notices daily, basing articles related to local layoffs when Austin businesses file with the state agency.

"At this time, we do not have a WARN notice from Spreetail," TWC spokesman Chaco Gamez wrote to Patch in response to an emailed inquiry.

Spreetail maintains offices at 416 Congress Ave. On its website, Spreetail says it got its start in 2006 as "...as a tiny 2-person company based in Lincoln, Nebraska," before growing in intervening years as a nationwide online retailer with offices located in eight cities across six states.