While the numbers are not eye-popping — Kohl’s, for example, said Tuesday it would hire 40,000 people, up 5 percent from last year — the upbeat plans come against a backdrop of poor growth in permanent jobs, including in the retail sector.
The main reason for the holiday optimism is that people keep shopping. Forecasts issued so far are predicting seasonal sales increases in the range of 2 percent to 3 percent.
“We expect additional hiring this year given the continued sales growth in our business — both in-store and online,” Terry Lundgren, Macy’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement last week. Macy’s said it would hire around 78,000 temporary workers, a 4 percent increase from last year.
J. C. Penney said it would hire 35,000 people, up from 30,000, while Target, which hired 92,000 holiday workers last year, expects that number to be slightly higher this year. Saks Fifth Avenue says it would hire about the same number as last year, and a Nordstrom spokesman, Colin Johnson, while declining to discuss specifics, said in an e-mail, “If we’re able to continue to build on our momentum we could have more holiday help this year.”
Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, declined to discuss its holiday hires, as did Sears.
Stores usually begin adding holiday staff in October, though the main growth is in November and December when shopper traffic really picks up. Macy’s already is listing dozens of holiday jobs on its careers Web site, from cosmetics sales to restocking.
Target has signs in about 170 of its stores encouraging customers to send a text message to get information about holiday employment. Early response has been encouraging, said Eddie Baeb, a Target spokesman.
But for some jobless people, the lure of holiday employment is a distraction. Harold Jacobs, 54, of Tuckahoe, N.Y., who lost his job at a store nine months ago, said he had no intention of applying for a temporary position.
“I don’t want to work for two months and then have to start looking all over again,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I want something permanent.”
Still many are applying, and Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said there will be real, if short-term, benefits.
“If that’s money in their pockets they didn’t otherwise have, that’s going to be headed right back into the economy on bills and necessities, so that’s a positive thing,” she said. “The problem is we have persistent high unemployment, and the fact that these particular jobs we’re talking about are temporary doesn’t make any sort of long-term solution.”
In 2010, about 496,000 temporary workers were hired in the retail sector in November and December, according to the National Retail Federation. That was a 49 percent increase from the prior year, though well below the four years before the recession, when hiring was above 600,000 each year.
Holiday sales in 2010 rose 5.2 percent to $453 billion, according to the trade group, well above the group’s prediction of 3.3 percent. The season is the biggest of the year for almost all retailers.
Some specialty stores are hiring fewer employees than last year. Best Buy, which in 2010 hired 29,000 part-time workers, this year will hire just 15,000. The company said in September that consumers were buying less than it had expected, and cut its profit outlook for the year.
Toys “R” Us is hiring 40,000 employees, which is 5,000 fewer than in 2010. Those notes of caution are worrisome, Ms. Shierholz said.
“I would hope we would be seeing substantial increases, so the fact that we have to ponder whether or not we’re stronger than the extremely weak fourth quarter of 2010 speaks to the weakness of this recovery,” she said.
The number of full-time workers in retail has improved a tiny bit since last year. The National Retail Federation’s economist says retailers have added about 100,000 full-time positions so far this year, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that about 14.57 million people were employed in retailing in August 2011, up about 1 percent from August 2010. But from July to August of this year, there was a 7.8 percent slide in the seasonally adjusted retail employment figures.
Hourly retailing jobs do not tend to be very lucrative. Cashiers have a median wage of $8.89 an hour, and retail sales staff earn a median wage of $9.94, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2010 figures. Those both fall below the $11.72 median hourly wage for all sales jobs, and the $16.27 median wage for jobs over all.
And holiday jobs only rarely turn into full-time work, a prospect that has Mr. Jacobs, the unemployed New York retail worker, feeling glum.
Mr. Jacobs was dismissed from his job managing a Manhattan pharmacy about nine months ago.
“I’ve never had this much trouble finding a job as I have now,” he said. He has applied at Macy’s, Modell’s, CVS, Duane Reade, Kmart and Target, and says he posts his résumé eight to 10 times a day on Craigslist but has had no luck.
“I get my hopes up a lot of times. I apply places, I think things are going well, and then, nothing,” said Mr. Jacobs.
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