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Wilson described the most recent job cuts as painful but necessary.

“I will tell you that, having come from small, medium and large e-commerce companies, this company more than anybody needed to restructure for future success,” he says.

Meghan Wilkinson and Stacey Suter had been working at a Shoes.com call centre in Burnaby for about 10 months before they lost their jobs on Aug. 9. According to Wilkinson, 30 to 40 people in her office were called into a boardroom and told it was their last day.

“We weren’t even allowed to go back to our desks,” she says.

While low wages had been a constant point of contention for the call-centre employees, Wilkinson says she was sad to leave what seemed like a promising career.

Suter, who was off work the day the cuts were announced, received the news at home. She was shocked.

“Your job security was preached to you, that you’d go up in the company really fast, there wouldn’t be any external hiring … that there was no way we’d lose our job in the foreseeable future,” she says.

But there were hints something was amiss, she adds.

Photo by Handout

One major headache was responding to customers whose orders were late. In the case of at least one vendor, those delays were a result of the company not paying its bills. Ecco Shoes Canada confirmed that Shoes.com had an outstanding balance, but it has now been paid in full. Another recently laid-off employee says she frequently had to deal with customers whose orders were wrong, including one who had received two right shoes.