Target said Monday that it’s stepping up store staffing, but eliminating about 500 jobs in distribution centers and regional offices as it tries to win back shoppers who have complained about sloppier shelves, out-of-stock items and longer checkout lines.

In an internal employee memo obtained by CNBC, the big-box retailer said it’s making changes to the way it runs and oversees stores to improve the customer experience, a top goal of the company’s new CEO Michael Fiddelke.

To do that, Target said it will reduce the number of store districts — the geographic areas that its nearly 2,000 stores are broken into, which have dedicated staffing — and put money toward more hours for frontline store employees.

As part of the changes, Target is laying off around 500 people, including about 100 at the store district level and about 400 across its supply chain sites, the internal email said.

“This change also fuels our ability to put significantly more payroll in our stores – primarily in additional labor and hours where needed most, but also in new guest experience training for every team member at every store,” the email said.

The email was written by Adrienne Costanzo, chief stores officer, and Gretchen McCarthy, chief supply chain and logistics officer, and sent to Target employees across its headquarters and store field teams on Monday afternoon.

A Target spokesperson declined to specify the amount of additional investment planned for Target stores, but said the announcement will not change starting wages for store workers, which range from $15 to $24 per hour depending on the location.

For Target, the organizational shift marks one of the first changes under Fiddelke, formerly the company’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer, who stepped into the top job on Feb. 1.

Fiddelke took the helm as the company aims to get back to growth. Its annual sales have been roughly flat for four years, and it cut 1,800 corporate roles last year in its first major layoff in a decade.

Customers, vendors and investors say the company had gotten weaker in some of the key areas where it used to stand out. For example, some shoppers said Target had lost its edge with attentive customer service and trendy, fashion-forward merchandise that earned the company its “Tarzhay” nickname.

The company has also faced backlash and boycotts from customers over a string of political and social stances over the past few years, including its decision to sell and then pull some Pride Month merchandise, its embrace of and reversal of major diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and most recently, for not speaking out against the surge of immigration enforcement in its hometown of Minneapolis.

Along with Target’s self-inflicted struggles, the company has faced stiffer competition from peers like Walmart and a tougher economic backdrop. Consumers have been more selective in recent years about discretionary purchases and impulse items — Target’s sweet spot — while paying more for necessities like groceries and rent.

In an interview with CNBC at Target’s Minneapolis headquarters in October, Fiddelke said his leading priorities as CEO would be restoring Target’s reputation for style and design, providing a more consistent customer experience and using technology to speed along the business.

Yet he added that Target needs to simplify an operation that’s become more complicated for store managers and store employees in recent years as they not only stock shelves, but pick orders for curbside pickup or pack up cardboard boxes heading to customers’ homes.

“If you’re a store manager now, yes, you’re supporting your in-store guest and you’re also running a fulfillment business that’s gotten pretty big,” he said in the October interview. “And I think we’re just now fully appreciating, ‘All right, we’ve got to make sure that we’re doing both really well and it’s more complex than it used to be.'”

Last year, the company made another store-related change to try to clean up and smooth over its operations. Almost all of Target’s online orders are fulfilled in stores, which has taken up more of employees’ time and stores’ backrooms. In response, the company shook up its online strategy, designating some stores as locations where employees pick and pack online orders to ship to customers’ homes and dropping that altogether at other locations.

Target is expected to share more details about its turnaround strategy, along with its holiday-quarter results and full-year forecast, on March 3. It will host an event for investors at its Minneapolis headquarters.

United Airlines will cancel 35 roundtrip flights a day from its schedule at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey after thousands of passengers faced hourslong delays this week, CEO Scott Kirby said Friday, blaming the disruptions on air traffic controller staffing shortages and the Federal Aviation Administration’s technology problems.

The flight cuts amount to about 10% of United’s daily schedule at its Newark hub.

More than 300 flights in and out of Newark were delayed as of Friday afternoon, adding to more than 1,400 other delays and cancellations earlier this week, according to flight-tracking site FlightAware.

“It’s disappointing to make further cuts to an already reduced schedule at Newark, but since there is no way to resolve the near-term structural FAA staffing issues, we feel like there is no other choice in order to protect our customers,” Kirby said in a note to customers on Friday.

The schedule cuts will begin this weekend.

Kirby said that 20% of air traffic controllers for Newark “walked off the job” in recent days after several technology failures.

“Keep in mind, this particular air traffic control facility has been chronically understaffed for years and without these controllers, it’s now clear – and the FAA tells us – that Newark airport cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there in the weeks and months ahead,” he said.

The FAA said in an advisory that staffing issues were delaying operations at Newark on Friday.

Kirby said the airline is now urging the agency to more tightly control capacity at the airport by establishing flight restrictions like those in place at other highly congested facilities like New York’s LaGuardia Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Last year, the FAA moved air traffic controllers responsible for airspace around Newark to Philadelphia instead of a facility in New York in an effort to help alleviate congestion.

The FAA and the Transportation Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Kirby’s statement. But Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote on X that he visited the Philadelphia facility that “to talk with our hard working air traffic controllers as we work to fix these equipment outages caused by outdated technology. It’s unacceptable.” He called for an “all-new air traffic control system.”

The air traffic controllers’ union declined to comment.

Kirby said he spoke with Secretary Duffy on Friday and praised the Trump administration for vowing to invest and fix aging air traffic control infrastructure in the U.S.

United said Thursday that FAA technology outages, runway construction and high winds led to the disruptions, which forced it to divert at least 21 flights.

Newark is one of the most congested airports in the country, and Kirby has repeatedly complained about shortfalls of air traffic controllers. United has also trimmed its Newark schedule in recent years because of excessive delays, blaming similar factors.

The Transportation Department on Thursday offered a new slate of incentives to help alleviate staffing shortages of air traffic controllers, a problem that has persisted for years and worsened during training pauses amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

United Airlines said it would waive change fees or fare differences for customers affected by the Newark disruptions.

WASHINGTON — How an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with American Airlines jetliner in a deadly crash over the Potomac River on Wednesday night is still unknown, but key questions are emerging, including about the altitude of the military helicopter.

Crash investigators recovered a flight recorder from the Sikorsky H-60 helicopter, adding to evidence they will comb through, which already includes interviews with air traffic controllers, including the one on duty at the time of the crash, and the two recorders from the airplane, National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said Friday.

Barges are en route to lift the large pieces of the CRJ-700 from the Potomac River on Saturday, Inman said at a briefing.

All 64 people on American Flight 5342 and the three aboard the helicopter were killed in the fireball collision near the Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport, marking the deadliest U.S. air crash since 2001.

Forty-one bodies have been recovered from the crash site, Fire and EMS Chief John Donnelly said at a press conference Friday. Of those, 28 have been positively identified.

“We have in aviation what’s called a ‘Swiss cheese approach,’ wherein if something fails, a backup should catch it, multiple layers of redundancy,” Inman said. “It’s been a very long time since we’ve had a major aviation incident in the United States and that’s why it’s one of the safest forms of transportation in the country.”

The PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ-700 aircraft was flying at about 300 feet on final approach into Reagan National’s Runway 33 shortly before 9 p.m. ET on Wednesday when it collided with the Black Hawk helicopter.

PSA Airlines is one of American’s subsidiaries that flies regional routes, flights marketed as American Eagle.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the helicopter was on an annual proficiency training flight.

According to Federal Aviation Administration rules, helicopters, which regularly cross through and around Washington, between military bases, the Pentagon and other locations, must fly in the area close to the airport at a maximum of 200 feet.

“In D.C., it’s kind of a unique environment,” Inman said at a briefing Thursday. He noted that there are helicopter zones, or tracks, in Washington. “This one was transitioning from track one to four as part of their normal procedure. If you live in D.C., you see a lot of helicopters going down into this area. So there’s a very well-defined system.”

The FAA will restrict helicopter traffic around the Reagan National Airport area, with some exceptions for medical evacuation and law enforcement operations, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said on X Friday.

The airspace is some of the most congested in the country and Reagan National says its main runway is the busiest in the U.S.

While the investigation is ongoing, two out of three runways are closed at the airport because of their proximity to the crash area. Terry Liercke, vice president and airport manager, told the press Friday that he expects those closures could last for about a week.

Officials at the airport said more than 100 flights had been canceled Friday, citing the runway closures and bad weather.

“As you turn to align with the runway, your concentration is on the flight path to get on the runway quickly and get the airplane stopped,” said John Cox, a retired airline pilot and aviation safety consultant.

The NTSB is leading the investigation into the collision that ended in a fireball. The agency said it is still gathering information and that it is too early to draw conclusions.

“It’s not that we don’t have information. We do have information,” said NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy. “We have substantial amounts of information. We need to verify information. We need to take our time to make sure it is accurate.”

The NTSB also recovered flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the passenger jet. The boxes were taken to NTSB labs for evaluation, the agency said.

President Donald Trump on Friday wrote on Truth Social that the helicopter “was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???”

Hegseth made a similar statement at a White House briefing Thursday.

“Tragically, last night a mistake was made,” he said. “There was some sort of an elevation issue that we have immediately begun investigating at the DoD and Army level.”

Both statements were unusual in the wake of a crash and the early stages of an airline accident investigation.

The accident ends a decade-and-a-half period of air safety in the U.S., which hasn’t seen a fatal commercial crash since 2009, even though passenger traffic has increased by more than 35% to records. That crash prompted a host of stricter pilot training and rest standards.

Shortages of air traffic controllers has been a concern for years, and a spate of close calls at U.S. airports have drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators.

Staffing at Reagan National the night of the crash wasn’t normal for the amount of traffic and time of day on the night of the crash, according to a preliminary FAA safety report on the collision, NBC News reported on Thursday.

Citing a source, NBC said the airport tower usually has a controller who focuses on helicopter traffic, though FAA guidelines allow for that position to be combined with another controller’s position, so one controller controls both airplanes and helicopters. The FAA didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report.

NBC News reported on Friday, citing a source familiar with the investigation that a supervisor at the Reagan National tower let a controller leave their shift early. 

Inman said on Friday that investigators will look back at air traffic controllers’ past 72 hours or even weeks.

“We’ll look at their training, their hiring, everything, what they probably ate that day,” he said. “But it is not one point that tells us everything. It’s layered into a lot of other information that’s very critical.”