“Retail picking up”. Where in this article does it say that?
It is common practice to retire higher payed senior management with college grads at a fraction of the salary.
In Dallas-Fort Worth, the average life of a small company controller/CFO is 18-24 months. That's about the time it takes for an experienced CPA to clean up the books and update the accounting system.
Once the job is done, management decides they "want to move in a different direction", i.e. bring in a younger, cheaper CPA that won't tell them "no, you can't do that".