There are a LOT of “under the radar” mass layoffs over the past few months. (or done in monthly waves or creative wording to avoid the various notification requirements)
Yup, this is exactly how some of the bigger companies don't draw a lot of news attention. As long as the number of layoffs doesn't exceed 50 in a 30 day period it will not trigger a WARN Act notification. Even then some of the larger companies around here if they let just over 50 people go it's not even 1% of their total workforce in Iowa and some of those are actually offset by new hires in other positions they are not downsizing and are actually expanding their operations in. If they do the layoffs in small spaced out increments then the media usually doesn't report on it but if they lay off 50 one week the media won't report that they also hired on 100 new employees that month.
As for Maverick and K&G this is not surprising as whenever there is an acquisition or merger of a company there is going to be a lot of job role duplication. Usually they keep everyone on until they merge all their systems so it doesn't affect day-to-day operations then once that is complete they start to eliminate positions that are over-staffed or no longer needed. With Maverick announcing that the rebranding of K&G stores now that means all the backend work is probably complete and its just a matter of getting those stores online with the go-forward operating model. There are probably some folks in the K&G headquarters with a lot of free time on their hands now that transition is complete which if that is the case its a good sign you probably don't have good job security.
I've been through this myself once and it sucks when it gets to that point as you stress over if you will have a job or not. Had the company I work in IT for merged with another company and for about 2 years they kept our staff completely intact while they onboarded or retired our systems. Once that was done then we basically had to interview for our jobs again along with our counter parts from the company that took us on as there were just too many employees to do the work for the number of positions that were needed for that department. It was definitely lopsided on how many of us were retained. Fortunately I was 1 of the lucky ones that was retained, but it was probably around a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of people for the company I worked for that were let go compared to the company we merged with and I was even surprised at a few of the ones they did not retain as they were some of our more qualified people IMO. I still remember the day they brought all the IT people in our area into a large auditorium after the merger was announced and one of our IT executives just told us point blank "the HR folks in the room are not going to be happy with me for saying this but everyone in this room better be updating your resumes because over half of you probably won't have a job here in a year or 2 and that likely includes myself." It turned out he was spot on in that prediction including himself being let go.