Holiday hiring expected to cool down this year

U.S. retailers are adding a healthy number of seasonal hires for the upcoming holiday shopping season, although not quite as many as they did one year ago, according to a forecast.

Stores will hire approximately 520,000 temporary workers to help them with this year’s Christmas rush, slightly under the 564,200 workers added in 2023, Chicago-based Challenger, Gray & Christmas is predicting.

That fourth-quarter hiring prediction is based on non-seasonally adjusted data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s based on several factors, including a drop in inflation that should make consumers more willing to spend money on Christmas gifts and accessories.

Holiday-related job postings began to appear online as early as September, and some large retailers have announced “large scale seasonal announcements, the global outplacement and executive coaching firm is predicting.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which based its report on an analysis more than 178,000 seasonal hiring plans for 2024, speculates on several paths that seasonal hiring might take this year.

First, retailers might not be able to fill all of the positions they need to fill, which has happened several times since the pandemic ended. Another possibility is that the economy will cool down faster than expected, leading consumers to cut back on their shopping.

If that happens, the need for temporary hires would drop.

“This prediction (assumes) that job gains are falling and consumers have tightened spending,” said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., in a statement. “That said, the cooling seems to be slow. Seasonal employers will add jobs, but need may fluctuate as the season progresses.”

Some of larger hiring plans announced so far by major U.S. retailers include, according to Challenger-Gray:

• Target Corp., says it plans to hire 100,000 workers for the upcoming holiday season, all of whom will be spread among the company’s stores and fulfillment centers. The Minneapolis-based department store chain is following the same approach to holiday hiring it has used since Christmas 2020, according to Challenger, Gray;
• Bath & Body Works says it will hire 20,000 seasonal workers at its stores in the United States and Canada, and 2,700 for its fulfillment centers in both of those countries;
• Burlington Stores, formerly known as Burlington Coat Factory, will bring on 1,500 full-time and 23,000 part-time seasonal employees in 2024;
• Aldi, the discount supermarket chain that serves the United States, Australia, China and Europe, will hire 13,000 holiday workers;
• 1800FLOWERS will hire 8,000 seasonal workers, about the same number it has hired during six of the last eight holiday shopping seasons;
• Amazon announced in early October that it will hire 250,000 full-, part-time and seasonal workers this year, just as it did in 2023. All Christmas hires will start at least at $18 an hour, with full-time employees eligible for benefits. Compensation for transportation workers will average $29 an hour;
• Macys will hire 31,500 full- and part-time seasonal employees this year, down from the 38,000 it attempted to hire last year;
• Dick’s Sporting Goods is looking to hire 8,000 seasonal workers this year, down from 8,600 one year ago and the 9,000 it expected to hire two years ago at this time. The Pennsylvania- based retailer has said that its employee turnover has declined during the past four years, which has lessened its need for Christmas hires;
• Two years ago, Walmart planned to hire 40,000 seasonal employees, but this year the retail giant will make no such pronouncement. Instead, it says it has been hiring workers all year, and that it will offer its employees extra hours when needed during the holiday shopping rush.

Given the state of the economy – 4.1 percent employment, 2.5 percent inflation, a strong stock market – it would be reasonable to expect more seasonal hiring this year, but that will not necessarily be the case, said Jay Prag, professor of economics at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University.

“Yes, it’s about the economy, but people are reading stories every day about stores closing and people losing their jobs,” Prag said. “That’s going to affect how much they will spend, and that will affect hiring.

“I would expect hiring to be up a little this year compared with last year, but (Challenger, Gray’s) prediction could be more accurate.”

Because e-commerce keeps growing, hiring at warehouse-distribution centers should be brisk, according to Prag.

“A lot of people don’t like to go to the store when they want to buy things,” Prag said. “They’d rather order what they want online.”

With Christmas one month away, it appears Challenger-Gray’s prediction is accurate, or will turn out that way. Despite predictions by some retail and transportation companies that they expect to make record hires this year, October saw fewer hires in those two sectors since before the pandemic.

Retail added 124,700 jobs last month, its lowest October number since 2018, while logistics added only 6.300 position, its lowest for that month since 2019.

Some of that can be attributed to the hurricanes that damaged the south and southwest parts of the country last month. The Inland Empire – despite being the undisputed capital of warehouse-distribution operations in the western United States – has also seen a slowdown in seasonal hires, according to one local job placement agency.

“We were slow last year, and we’ve been slow again this year,” said Maria Lopez, manager with Power House Staffing in Rancho Cucamonga. “I hope it will improve, but I can’t say that it will. If you have someone who is looking for a temporary logistics job, send them our way.”