U.S. retailers will hire the lowest number of seasonal workers for this holiday season since 2008, due to increased labor costs and shaky consumer confidence, according to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas provided exclusively to Reuters. Retailers are expected to add just 410,000 seasonal jobs this season, according to an analysis of non-seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) by the global outplacement and executive coaching firm. That is above the 324,900 workers they added during the last quarter of the financial recession of 2008. U.S. retailers added 519,400 jobs in the last quarter of 2022, a 26 percent decline from the same period in 2021.
Total Retail’s Take: With labor costs rising and consumer confidence wavering amid economic uncertainty, retailers are being cautious with their holiday hiring plans. While such a strategy can help maintain or reduce costs, potentially boosting the bottom line, it likewise can have a negative impact on customer experience, which of course is closely correlated to a retailer’s top line. Not having enough in-store associates to meet customer demand for assistance or having too few warehouse personnel to quickly and efficiently fulfill and ship online orders will leave consumers frustrated, either driving them away from making an initial purchase or from coming back to purchase again. Retailers will be challenged this upcoming holiday season to find the appropriate levels of staffing while keeping a close eye on costs in anticipation of softer consumer demand for their products.
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