Amazon announced Tuesday it will be looking to hire another 100,000 workers this holiday season. That’s on top of the nearly 200,000 additional workers brought on earlier this year to help with the surge of e-commerce buying. The pandemic has changed the way Americans shop and what they shop for. And that is changing the way retailers are hiring for the holiday season this year.
Luke Walker is a seasoned seasonal retail worker. He’s been on the floor at a Dick’s Sporting Goods in St. Louis helping herd deal-crazed customers during previous Black Fridays.
“People were a little testy just trying to make sure they get the good deals,” he said.
This year, he’s avoiding the crowds with a night job in a big-box store.
“Basically, I’m just an order picker,” he said. “I go around the store, find the items that they’ve ordered and then package them.”
Going from the sales floor to the stockroom is emblematic of changes in the pandemic holiday economy, said Daniel Zhao, an economist with job site Glassdoor.
“Christmas isn’t canceled, but the holiday season is going to look very different for retailers and workers alike,” he said.
He found hiring for seasonal and retail jobs is down 8% overall on Glassdoor.
But AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist with job site Indeed, said hiring in some parts of retail is stronger than ever.
“One that is doing particularly well is loading and stocking,” she said. “That can mean warehousing jobs, that can also mean back-of-store stocking shelves and stores.”
Those jobs tripled compared to past years, and there are now more warehouse jobs in the United States than before the pandemic. That has pushed up wages in the sector despite high unemployment, said Andy Challenger, senior vice president of staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
“The competition for workers that have the technical expertise and the capacity to work in a warehouse is really intense,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that have left the labor market for fear of catching the COVID-19 virus.”
Many parents have also dropped out of the labor market in order to care for kids at home. These factors are also driving a spike in seasonal work-from-home jobs, said Sara Sutton, CEO of FlexJobs.
“We’re seeing a lot of activity around customer service because of the increase in online ordering,” she said.
The Gap and Williams Sonoma have made a big push for remote roles. They’ll still have to handle deal-crazed customers, but not the endless loop of in-store holiday music.
How many people are flying? Has traveled picked up?
Flying is starting to recover to levels the airline industry hasn’t seen in months. The Transportation Security Administration announced on Oct. 19 that it’s screened more than 1 million passengers on a single day — its highest number since March 17. The TSA also screened more than 6 million passengers last week, its highest weekly volume since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. While travel is improving, the TSA announcement comes amid warnings that the U.S. is in the third wave of the coronavirus. There are now more than 8 million cases in the country, with more than 219,000 deaths.
How are Americans feeling about their finances?
Nearly half of all Americans would have trouble paying for an unexpected $250 bill and a third of Americans have less income than before the pandemic, according to the latest results of our Marketplace-Edison Poll. Also, 6 in 10 Americans think that race has at least some impact on an individual’s long-term financial situation, but Black respondents are much more likely to think that race has a big impact on a person’s long-term financial situation than white or Hispanic/Latinx respondents.
Find the rest of the poll results here, which cover how Americans have been faring financially about six months into the pandemic, race and equity within the workplace and some of the key issues Trump and Biden supporters are concerned about.
What’s going to happen to retailers, especially with the holiday shopping season approaching?
A report out recently from the accounting consultancy BDO USA said 29 big retailers filed for bankruptcy protection through August. And if bankruptcies continue at that pace, the number could rival the bankruptcies of 2010, after the Great Recession. For retailers, the last three months of this year will be even more critical than usual for their survival as they look for some hope around the holidays.
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October 28, 2020 at 05:01AM
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Pandemic pushes holiday retail jobs off the sales floor - Marketplace
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