User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Technical Update: November 8, 2011/@comment-1361074-20111110081229/@comment-957747-20111110202242

The chevrons have been needed since the beginning to show which menus have sub-menus. They were added (As Tm T said above for accessibility) and should be a core functionality (IE, shouldn't be able to be removed site-wide via CSS) for those users that need that accessibility. You can remove them for yourself Wikia-wide by a single line in your global.css file.

Also, the padding isn't extreme. It's only 9 pixels total from the right of the menu item and the end of the chevron itself. That's less than the total padding from one menu item to the next. You can easily halve the normal 30 pixel padding between each menu item and have a lot more space.

The above can be placed into the site's CSS to reduce space taken up and could be placed in your global.css file to affect all wikis you frequent as well.