The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Changing times
Workforce needs face continued adaptations
For a retail industry in immediate need of 10,000 people in Connecticut — and perhaps more over the coming year — the bankruptcy closures of local Toys R Us stores this past summer opened up one tap of workers trained in the retail trade.
A bigger spigot is needed in the short term — but over the long run, the current inventory of retail talent might be sufficient for an industry still struggling to latch onto a new sense of relevance for shoppers.
As of Friday morning, retailers had 10,000 job openings in Connecticut posted on the Indeed.com career website, with about three in four of those positions offering full-time hours. Stamford and Danbury lead Connecticut with 10 percent of the total openings, with Milford and Norwalk the only other two cities in the southwestern corner of the state to place in the top 10 for retail job opportunities.
In a year’s time, it will likely be Norwalk that dominates the state’s openings, with the developer of the SoNo Collection mall under construction just off Interstate 95 aiming to open in time for the 2019 holiday shopping season. At full capacity, the mall’s tenants will employ nearly 2,500 people as estimated previously by
original mall developer GGP, which was acquired in late August by Brookfield Properties.
As of July, Norwalk had fewer than 1,900 residents seeking work, as calculated by the Connecticut Department of Labor, with the wider region having about 25,000 people who would take the right offer. GGP originally had projected SoNo Collection salaries ranging between $42,000 and $100,000, but several
retailers have gone on the record of late that they expect to have to pay more this holiday season, and perhaps beyond in the competition for workers.
“(There) are areas where we have gone out and actively hired for expertise, and that’s where things like the wage investments are so critical,” said John Mulligan, chief operations officer of Target which lists more than 200 open jobs at present in Connecticut. “They’ve allowed us to differentiate in who and how we hire people . ... This has been a journey we’ve been on for a couple of years; we will be on it for a couple more years as the team continues to evolve and build capabilities, but we think it’s something incredibly important to our longterm success.”
450 jobs through 2026
Target is only one of a number of retailers in the midst of preholiday hiring campaigns, with The Home Depot listing more than 350 openings and Macy’s scheduling a jobs fair at Danbury Fair mall for Thursday starting at 11 a.m. and running through 7 p.m.
In all likelihood, at least some of those applicants will be coming from stores where they recently lost jobs. As of Friday, the Connecticut Department of Labor had yet to post any notification from Toys R Us on the numbers of jobs it cut in its mass layoffs this year as required under state law, but in New York the company jettisoned anywhere from 70 to 110 workers at each store.
This past August, the state’s retail sector contracted by about 600 workers on a net basis, as estimated by the Connecticut Department of Labor. With Connecticut employment up 1 percent in August from a year earlier, the
retail sector dropped by a near-identical margin over a 12-month span, amounting to 1,800 lost jobs.
It was not the most severe contraction — government employment was down 2.2 percent, and the entertainment sector 1.8 percent — but mirrored trends nationally amid a wave of retail bankruptcies as Amazon woos shoppers with a seemingly endless stream of innovations and offers. Over the 10-year period through 2026, DOL guesses Connecticut retailers will add only 450 jobs to a base of about 185,000, a growth rate of just 0.3 percent.
Evolution of the staffing model
In an effort to create an employment feeder for the SoNo Collection’s stores and others with near-term needs, GGP invested $250,000 to create a retail customer service certificate program at Norwalk Community College, with this year’s session starting up Oct. 9 and running 6 to 9 p.m. over 10 sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The cost is $25 to enroll, with information online at Norwalk.edu/extendedstudies or via phone at 203-857-7237.
NCC offers the program in tandem with the National Retail Foundation, which in January 2017 created the RISE Up training program — an acronym for Retail Industry Skills and Education. More than 45,000 people have completed RISE Up to date through 1,700 organizations offering programs like the NCC workshops.
The program covers an array of store-level strategic and selling considerations, to include pricing strategies depending on the type of retailer and its location, for instance, in a factory outlet; methods to curry repeat visits from customers; influencing a purchase; and incentivizing workers on the store floor.
For now, top of mind for retailers this holiday season are the incentives they can extend to get new workers onto those floors. In late October, NRF holds a New York City conference titled “Retail Works” on how stores can improve their recruitment and retention of quality workers, with one session addressing wage and benefit “progression” in the industry and speakers including representatives of Nordstrom and Walmart.
Nordstrom plans to open a new department store next fall at the SoNo Collection in Norwalk, with the company’s store president Jamie Nordstrom noting in August the ongoing evolution of shopping heading into the 2018 holiday season.
“When a third of your business is done online in any given market, the nature of that traffic is different — a lot of those customers are coming in having already decided what they want to buy because they’ve been shopping on our website,” Nordstrom said in a mid-August conference call. “Part of our big opportunity is looking at our stores and figuring out how do we need to evolve the staffing model, the layout, the services and experiences that we offer in our stores to continue to be relevant to that customer.”