Retail workers have had enough
Employees quitting at rate 70% higher than others
To be a U.S. retail worker in 2023 means fielding an onslaught of growing American anxieties about everything from high prices to politics. Increasingly, some workers say the job isn’t worth the wages.
Low pay, erratic schedules and monotonous tasks have long been a challenge for the nearly 8 million Americans working in retail, but the pandemic years have added a host of taxing new duties. Employees must cope with an uptick in shoplifting and customer orneriness. They manage online orders and run up and down the aisles to unlock items as quotidian as toothpaste.
A 2022 McKinsey study found that the quit rate for retail workers is more than 70% higher than in other U.S. industries. And the pandemic years made the problem worse. Before 2020, turnover for part-time retail employees — who make up the bulk of the in-store workforce — hovered around 75%, according to data from Korn Ferry. Since then it’s shot up to 95% and hasn’t budged, which has at times led to understaffed stores.
The declining worker experience follows a tough decade for retailers. Stores that survived the “retail apocalypse” have had to find ways to cut costs and boost profits with fewer shoppers. For many, particularly small brands, that has meant reducing head count, or finding other ways to bring in money. Physical locations increasingly double as returns and logistics centers, as companies build out hybrid online and offline services. The early years of the pandemic brought a slight respite, as people stuck at home spent their time — and stimulus checks — on online shopping. But that quickly gave way to supply chain issues that snarled inventories and the era of high inflation.
To hear rank-and-file retail employees tell it, working conditions started to deteriorate when they returned to the job after pandemic lockdowns. Customers didn’t particularly like being told to wear masks or forgo free samples. But as health and safety protocols eased, tensions didn’t.
“You’re just kind of at the mercy of customers and however they’re feeling,” says Adam Ryan, who works at a Target in Virginia.
Nearly four out of five companies have seen a rise in “guest-on-associate violence” over the last five years, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group. Large retailers say their annual apprehension of shoplifters climbed by more than 50% in 2022, according to a survey by Jack L. Hayes International, a loss prevention consulting firm headquartered in Wesley Chapel, Fla. Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nordstrom and Dollar Tree all played up theft in recent investor calls.
And in today’s era of political polarization, some have been caught in the crossfire of the culture war — most notably at Target, which pulled some LGBTQ-themed merchandise from its shelves earlier this year after employees were subjected to what CEO Brian Cornell described as “gut-wrenching” threats from certain customers. “Violence in stores for political reasons is something that we didn’t really experience in the past,” says Stuart Appelbaum, president of the 100,000-member Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
Target declined to comment.