Better holiday sales don’t necessarily mean more holiday jobs

Sales are expected to be up this year, but several factors – starting with the growing popularity of e-commerce shopping – likely will keep hiring down

With consumers expected to spend more during the upcoming holiday shopping season, it follows that retailers are planning to hire more temporary workers to help with the extra workload.

Not necessarily.

Two of the country’s leading non-profit retail associations, the International Council of Shopping Centers in New York and the National Retail Federation in Washington, D.C., are both predicting weak seasonal hiring for 2013.

The council expects a meager increase of 0.5 percent compared with 2012, while the retail federation says hiring will stay the same: between 720,000 and 780,000 jobs will be added this year during the Christmas season, one year after 750,000 temporary workers were hired.

If the prediction holds true it will represent major shift away from the previous three years. Christmas employment grew roughly 13 percent in 2012 and 2011 and a staggering 52.6 percent in 2010, as the country began to emerge from the worst of the Great Recession, according to the retail federation.

Since both the council and the retail federation are predicting that sales will increase more than three percent year-to-year in 2013, a prediction that hiring will be down is a little baffling. In the past, those numbers have gone up or down together.

But several factors, especially the growing popularity of online shopping, are contributing to the decline in seasonal hiring, according to some analysts.

“If you want to get a job during the holidays, your best bet might be to live close to a warehouse-distribution center, because those places still have to process orders and they’re still hiring,” said Chris Thornberg, founding partner with Beacon Economics LLC in Los Angeles. “But the stores aren’t hiring as much, even though we have a stronger labor market than we’ve had for a while.”

Online shopping accounted for about six percent of all holiday sales in the United States during 2006. Last year they accounted for 12 percent, and that number is only going to get bigger, according to Thornberg.

“Shopping online will continue to accelerate, but no one is saying that traditional shopping is going away,” Thornberg said. “People still like shopping at Ontario Mills, but some stores are being pushed to the side.”

Several major retailers are going to hire slightly more seasonal workers this year than they did last year, and one major chain isn’t going to hire as many. Overall hiring is expected to be flat at best, according to published reports:

• Macy’s has announced that it plans to hire 83,000 people this year. That’s the most of any major U.S. retailer and 3,000 more than it hired last year. Those workers will be spread among Macy’s stores, call centers and distribution facilities;

• Walmart, which has said it doesn’t expect a robust holiday season, says it will hire 55,000 seasonal workers, about 5,000 more than it hired in 2012;

• Kohl’s will make 53,070 seasonal hires, about 350 more than in did last year. Its 2013 hires will include about 6,400 people who will work in the chain’s distribution operations and call centers;

• JCPenney, which recently fired its chief executive officer and is struggling to return to profitability after implementing a strategy that did away with sales and discounts in favor of “everyday” low prices, will hire about 35,000 Christmas worker this year. JCPenney did not announce its seasonal hiring figures from 2012;

• Target is one major chain that is cutting back. It plans to hire 70,000 seasonal workers this year nationwide, compared with the 88,000 it hired one year ago;

• Amazon.com, the world’s largest e-commerce firm, will hire 70,000 workers this year. In October, Amazon.com opened a 1.2 million-square-foot distribution facility in San Bernardino, and on the same day announced plans to develop a similar operation in Moreno Valley.

One activity that is usually a good indicator of how much Christmas hiring will happen in Southern California – imports at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach – doesn’t bode that well for more jobs being available.

Imports at Los Angeles were unchanged year-to-year in August and up slightly in September, the two months when holiday goods start arriving in the Unites States, said Rachel Campbell.

Long Beach posted stronger year-to-year numbers for those two months, but some of that was because several logistics companies moved from Los Angeles to Long Beach during the past year, Campbell said.

“Overall, the numbers were pretty flat,” Campbell said.

Sarah Cullins, vice president of business development with Corporate Resource Services, a temporary staffing company in Rancho Cucamonga, hopes those import numbers perk up in October and November.

Much of what is shipped into Los Angeles and Long Beach is stored in warehouses in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and Corporate Resource Services places a lot of workers into the two-county region’s sprawling logistics industry.

A lot of those placements happen during the holidays, and this year the company expects to place between 900 and 1,000 people in temporary jobs in the Inland region, Cullins said.

Some of those people will be placed in e-commerce facilities, which are becoming “bigger and bigger” in the local economy, according to Cullins.

“We usually place between 600 and 800 people, so it will be more than usual but not much,” Cullins said. “If it’s true that a lot of the jobs are going to be at distribution centers, then [the Inland Empire] is the place to be.”

One regional shopping mall in the Inland Empire expects to see more hiring during the holiday season.

Multiple specialty stores at the Montclair Plaza are hiring, and during the past month or so a lot of people have walked into the plaza’s management store asking about temporary work, said Scott Lewis, the plaza’s general manager.

“There’s no question that Internet sales are having an impact, but we still have a lot of regular jobs,” Lewis said. “I don’t think the regular holiday job is going away yet. We’ve been up for the past 18 months, and that should last through Christmas.”