Online shopping chews up store jobs
new york — Retail stores are cutting jobs at the sharpest pace in more than seven years, evidence of a seemingly inexorable shift away from employee-heavy stores as Americans increasingly shop online.
A combined 60,600 retail job losses over the past two months have had less to do with the health of US consumer spending than with changes in buying habits. In the age of Amazon, traditional stores, from J.C. Penney to Macy’s, have accelerated store closures and are experimenting with the use of fewer employees to staff the remaining stores.
The industry has also been bruised by a string of bankruptcy filings, most recently from Payless ShoeSource. The company announced this week that it was closing nearly 400 stores, nearly 10 per cent of its fleet.
The job cuts in the retail industry, unwelcome as they are, are still a relatively minor burden for the overall US economy. But for Americans seeking a foothold in the job market, the pullback represents a painful obstacle. Retail accounts for nearly one-third of first-time jobs in the United States, so a retrenchment by the industry’s employers can block access to the job market for many.
As shopping on the web has expanded, retail jobs have represented a declining share of the labour market. They now account for 10.9 per cent of jobs, compared with 11.6 per cent in 2000, says Michael Niemira, principal of The Retail Economist, a research firm. And experts expect more store closings — and job losses — in coming months.
“It’s principally about the impact of online shopping and how consumers are shopping differently than ever before,” Niemira said. “It’s harder for the industry to consistently do well and make money.”
Take Fernando Ramirez, a 19-year-old restaurant server and college student, who was looking Friday to buy some sweaters at a Kohl’s in Tustin, California. Ramirez said he stops at a department store or mall once or twice a week to see what’s available. But most of his buying is done on the web.
“It’s mostly to browse and see what they have,” said Ramirez, who lives in Tustin, California. “I do more of my purchasing online now.”
The two-month contraction in retail jobs — 30,900 lost in February and 29,700 in March — marked the largest two-month decline since December 2009, when the industry shed 62,200 jobs. That month’s loss had signaled the end of a prolonged decline in the industry resulting from the Great Recession.
The retail industry losses for February and March were contained in Friday’s US jobs report from the government. The report offered an overall mixed message: Hiring in the US dropped to its weakest pace in nearly a year, but the unemployment rate managed to reach its lowest level in nearly a decade. — AP