Retail job growth is spiraling down
It’s never a good time to be laid off, but it came at a particularly difficult time for Debbie, who was in her early 50s when she was let go from her job in 2010 after 21 years as a high school science teacher.
In the wake of the Great Recession, nobody was hiring teachers, especially more experienced ones. So Debbie, who declined to give her last name so as not to jeopardize her job prospects, took whatever she could find — jobs at Kroger, Party City, Valero. When she was last laid off, the retail jobs seemed to have dried up entirely.
“As far as job hunting, you’re not going to find anything around here that’s retail,” Debbie said as she clicked through listings at Cypress Assistance Ministries, a faith-based group that helps people get back on their feet.
And she’s right: In Houston, even while retail developments continue to mushroom and the rest of the Houston economy has kicked back into gear, retail employment growth has fallen off a cliff. In the past few months, the sector has shrunk on a year-over-year basis for the first time since 2010.
It could be just a blip — or it could be part of broader trends in the in-
dustry, with big-box stores going bankrupt as ordering moves online.
Parker Harvey, chief economist with Gulf Coast Workforce Solutions, is puzzled.
“From a real estate perspective, retail is doing exceptionally well,” he said. “At a certain point, though, it’s not translating into jobs. It’s hard to square those two trends. It’s a conundrum. It really, really is.”
The elephant in the room: Amazon.com, which is building an enormous distribution center in northwest Houston and another in Katy. The whiteboard at Cypress Assistance Ministries announces that they’re hiring 2,500 warehouse workers, but that’s nowhere near enough to replace the cashiering, shelf-stocking and floor-cleaning jobs that are disappearing.
The e-commerce behemoth’s acquisition of Whole Foods could extend the shrinkage of retail employment into the grocery sector, if Amazon finds a way to make home grocery delivery easier than going shopping, or reduce staffing through automation like it has in its new cashier-less “Amazon Go” grocery store prototype. So far, the company says it plans to keep Whole Foods as it is.
“Amazon has no plans to use the technology it developed for Amazon Go to automate the jobs of cashiers at Whole Foods,” a spokesman said in a statement. “No job reductions are planned as a result of the deal.”
Now, retail jobs aren’t usually the best paid. They don’t always have a route to advancement. But they do serve as a first line as a résumé for young people, and as a safety net for older people who might have had careers cut short before they planned.
And there are a lot of those people. About 360,000 able-bodied people in Harris County between the age of 25 and 64 are unemployed or not in the labor force, meaning they are not working or looking for work (excluding people enrolled in school or staying home to raise kids), according to a new analysis of American Community Survey data by the Brookings Institution.
Of those, 62 percent have high school degrees or less, and retail jobs usually don’t require anything more.
For Debbie, it’s a long four years until she can claim Social Security, and she worries about getting another teaching job when new recruits fresh out of school are much cheaper. For the last six months, she has lived out of her car at the parking lot behind her church, hoping some kind of work will come through.
“I think people who move to this area think there are a lot more jobs than there actually are,” she says.