Retail giants’ hiring season has begun
Stores are staffing up already as forecasts for holiday sales are optimistic.
For national retailers, this is the season to start building an army.
The recruitment began late last month with in-store and online postings to handle the holiday crunch. The National Retail Federation forecast that holiday sales will be 3.7 percent higher this year than last.
Macy’s has plans to hire 85,000 seasonal associates companywide. Target 70,000. Kohl’s 69,000. Wal-Mart 60,000. And Toys R Us 40,000.
Why so many? It’s twofold, said Bob Phibbs, CEO of the Retail Doctor, a retail consultancy based in New York.
“We all know what it’s like to wait in line at Starbucks,” Phibbs said. “Retail is a game of seconds, not minutes, because now one can easily scan and buy the item online and not have to wait in line.
“You don’t want that,” Phibbs said. “Those things typically get passed down from person to person.”
A 2015 global survey of online shoppers found that 2 percent never shop at a brickand-mortar store, 3 percent do it once a year and 24 percent several times.
To better serve those online shoppers, Amazon.com hired 80,000 temporary workers last year and is expected to match that this year.
Second, there’s the pitfall of having too few staffers to get through New Year’s, and the immediate days after to deal with gift returns.
“Salaried workers have to work longer, which means having to pay overtime because there aren’t enough of them,” Phibbs said. “You lose customers as a result of some of them having a bad shopping experience.
“The stakes are really high,” he said. “That’s why getting the forecasting model ... is critical.”
“If coverage plans aren’t there, you are in a potentially bad place because you can’t navigate that many customers or adjust your schedule with your crew on the fly,” he said.
Retailers want them typically in place two weeks before Thanksgiving.
Phibbs said memories linger of the recession of 2008, when no one was shopping, prices were slashed, and retailers stopped hiring.
“Stores were empty, and the argument was whether (retailers) cut temporary help too much,” he said. “We are just coming back to what is considered normal.”
Economist Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors Inc. in Holland, Pa., said holiday hiring doesn’t artificially lower the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, now 5.1 percent nationally, because the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics accounts for these workers. “We are talking about being off by maybe 0.1 percentage point even in the crazy months of seasonal hiring and firing,” Naroff said.