Long lines may await holiday shoppers
Lower retail staffing this season may not be able to keep up with crowds
Standing in line to get holiday bargain is something of a badge of honor for consumers in Connecticut and across the country.
But this holiday season, lines shoppers encounter at malls and stores across the state may have as much to do with retail staffing levels as the sheer volume of consumers. David Cadden, a professor emeritus at Quinnipiac University’s School of Business, said store owners and managers are faced with a dilemma.
“The dilemma is how do I hire enough full time employees so that the queues in stores are sufficiently small?” Cadden said. “Because of inflation, the anticipation is it will be a bad holiday season and so retailers don’t hire as many people. And I don’t think retailers still have gotten a complete handle on whether people are responding to the easing of COVID restrictions or whether consumers are still avoiding going to stores in significant numbers.”
Shannon Warner of the consulting firm Kearney told Bloomberg News that retailers just “don’t have enough people to staff the full hours that they have historically had.” Warner said she is urging retail clients to consider automation and other efficiency moves as possible solutions to the retail labor shortage.
The Connecticut Department of Labor is reporting that the state has 114,000 open jobs currently. But according to Joe Budd, a spokesman for the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, the state data regarding job openings does not break them out by industry sector.
The latest data from the National Retail Federation finds that retailing employment is Connecticut’s largest job sector with almost 350,000 workers at nearly 44,000 businesses.
Mastercard SpendingPulse reported U.S. in-store sales on Black Friday rose 12 percent from last year. Here in Connecticut,
some retail centers Connecticut reported robust sales activity on the day that traditionally is the start of the holiday shopping season.
Westfarms had a record day, according to Amanda Sirica, a spokeswoman for the mall, which straddles the West Hartford and Farmington border. And consumer interest in shopping at Clinton Premium Outlets was so strong that traffic backed up on both directions on Interstate 95 at the exits for the retail center.
“Judging from the crowds we saw, it doesn’t feel like we’re headed for a recession,” said Kathleen Mones, marketing manager for Clinton Premium Outlets
At Clinton Premium Outlets on
Black Friday, some retailers had lines with dozens of people waiting to get into the stores, according to Mones. At one point during the afternoon on Black Friday, Mones said the line of customers waiting to get into the center’s Nike Factory Outlet had as may as 50.
“We did have some retailers that limited the number of customers in store at one time because they didn’t have a full complement of workers to staff the store,” she said.
Sirica said Westfarms tenants were well staffed. But she said some retailers had to create queuing lines in some common areas because their stores had reached maximum capacity under fire
codes.
Economists and retail experts are split on whether any staffing shortages in stores during the holiday shopping season will have a lasting impact on the buying habits of Connecticut consumers.
Cadden said the idea of forcing customers to wait in line to get into a store “is a deadly problem, speaking in retail sense.”
“People can decide to another store to get what they want or go online,” he said. “And they may never come back.”
Steven Lanza, an associate professor of economics at the University of Connecticut, said consumers who chose to brave the holiday crowds have an ex
pectation that there are tradeoffs associated with shopping at bricks-and-mortar retailers at this time of year.
“I think shoppers are probably used to some kind of craziness around the holidays, likely have short memories about such annoyances, and can probably be won back with post-holiday sales if retailers end up saddled with merchandise at the end of the season,” Lanza said. “Under those circumstances, if they offend a few customers by enforcing a building capacity limit, it’s probably a reasonable trade-off. My guess is that any alienation would only be temporary.”