600 people set to lose jobs as Lotte Department Store Masan closes

The inside of Lotte Department Store Masan Branch in Changwon on Friday. [YONHAP]

The Lotte Department Store Masan branch in Changwon, Gyeongnam, will cease operations on Sunday, resulting in over 600 employees losing their jobs.

As announced to Changwon residents in April, the Lotte Department Store Masan branch will close its doors for the last time at 8:30 p.m. on June 30, according to Changwon Special City on Friday.

With the closure of the Masan branch, over 600 employees, predominantly middle-aged women in their 40s to 60s, will lose their jobs, raising concerns in the local community about the financial difficulties it will soon face.

Currently, around 600 employees work in an array of roles in store management, sales, cleaning and security.

The closure of the branch will immediately eliminate these jobs.

While Lotte Department Store is set to relocate around 70 employees to other branches in July after the closure of the Masan branch, the remaining 530 employees are not directly employed by Lotte Department Store.

Lotte Department Store is considering reemployment support measures for the affected personnel.

Some 440 of the remaining 530 employees are registered as individual business owners because they work for stores operating in the Lotte Department Store Masan branch, making them ineligible for unemployment benefits.

Around 70 individuals have registered for job-seeking assistance with Changwon Special City and other related agencies.

The Changwon branch of the Ministry of Employment and Labor plans to provide employment support for former employees of the department store by August.

The Masan branch had posted the lowest sales among Lotte Department Store's 32 stores nationwide.

The Masan branch, rebranded after Lotte acquired the Daewoo Department Store in 2015, was leased from KB Asset Management, which recently requested that the property be vacated for development purposes.

BY CHOI HAE-JIN [choi.haejin@joongang.co.kr]