CarMax adding nearly 1,000 jobs, including 57 locally

January 24, 2012
By Louis Llovio / Richmond Times-Dispatch

Automotive retailer CarMax Inc. is adding nearly 1,000 employees nationwide, including 46 at its corporate offices in Goochland County and 11 at its two area stores.

The chain said Monday that it plans to hire 965 people to work at its 107 stores in 52 markets. Most of the positions will be in sales and service, but the company will hire some to work in its purchasing department and business office.

CarMax will hire four for its Chesterfield County store on Midlothian Turnpike and seven for its Henrico County store on West Broad Street. Those jobs will be sales and service positions.

The 46 corporate jobs will be in several departments, including information technology, marketing, accounting and strategy.

"We are looking to hire the positions as quickly as possible and shooting to have everyone in place by the beginning of April," CarMax spokeswoman Britt Farrar said.

This is the second major hiring push the company has made in the past year and a half.

In November 2010, the company announced that it was hiring about 1,200 people to work at its stores.

That push came about two years after CarMax, citing lagging sales, cut its workforce by 610 employees. That mass layoff happened in October 2008 during the heart of the economic downturn, when sales across the auto industry slowed dramatically.

But CarMax has seen its business bounce back since then.

In December, CarMax reported that sales for the three months ending Nov. 30 grew nearly 7 percent to $2.6 billion compared with the same period in the previous year.

Comparable store used-unit sales fell 3 percent during the fiscal third quarter, but that's after jumping 16 percent during the same period in the previous year.

The rebound has led CarMax to resume expansion. The company has opened four stores in the first nine months of the fiscal year that ends Feb. 29. It expects to open 10 superstores by the end of February 2013 and between 10 and 15 in each of the next three fiscal years.

"Today's hiring announcement addresses hiring needs in our current stores across the country. This does not address projected hiring for the new stores," Farrar said.

The news that CarMax is expanding its employee ranks comes less than a week after Fortune magazine named it one of the top 100 companies to work for in the U.S. for the eighth straight year.

Copyright Richmond Times-Dispatch. Used by permission.

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