Not very long ago, retailers were luring hard-to-find workers with deep employee discounts, salaries well above the minimum wage and even signing bonuses.
Now retailers – in the midst of the pre-holiday hiring season – aren’t quite as desperate. Although it still isn’t easy finding retail workers, merchants generally have more applicants to choose from.
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“I would say it’s been a little easier (hiring seasonal workers) than last year,” said Patty Machon, general manager at Restoration Hardware at Providence Place. “We certainly haven’t had any problem finding quality applicants.”
Machon said last week that the store already has hired 12 employees for the holiday shopping season and plans to add about 10 more, which would roughly match the number of seasonal workers hired last year.
But many retailers are hiring fewer workers this holiday season, reflecting slower sales from dipping consumer confidence. And some big national chains, including Nordstrom and Staples, recently cut jobs.
According to the U.S. Labor Department, 81,000 retail jobs were lost in October – a month when stores historically are ramping up their hiring for the busy shopping season.
Layoffs in the retail sector, along with job losses in a number of other industries, have loosened what had been an extremely tight job market for Rhode Island retailers.
“What we’re seeing this year is higher-quality applicants,” said Todd Corrente, general manager at the Eddie Bauer store at Providence Place Mall. The store plans to add 25 to 30 seasonal workers, Corrente said.
“We’re getting a lot of applicants that have just recently been let go from other jobs, and they tend to be mature, quality people,” he said, adding that many were laid off from other retailers, commission-based sales jobs or big corporations. A number of them were let go by technology companies, he said.
While rising unemployment has added to the applicant pool for retailers, many still struggle to find adequate workers.
“Minimum-wage workers are always somewhat difficult to find,” said Leonard Lardaro, an economist at the University of Rhode Island. “But retailers are not having as hard of a time finding people this year.”
Lardaro pointed to plunging help-wanted advertising, which he says is a pretty good barometer of retail hiring.
For each of the first nine months of this year, help-wanted advertising in Rhode Island saw double-digit percentage declines compared to the previous year. September had the biggest drop, down 25 percent from a year earlier.
But surprisingly, retail employment in the state has edged higher recently, according to Lardaro’s Current Conditions Index, which rates 12 economic indicators in the state. Rhode Island had about 89,800 retail workers in September, 1.6 percent more than September of 2000.
Lardaro attributed that small gain to the momentum from the opening of Providence Place, which still is “defining itself,” he said. But overall, he says retailers are hiring fewer workers in anticipation of sluggish holiday shopping season.
Another reason the state’s retail employment count hasn’t dropped: Instead of cutting jobs, many retailers trim hours. Those workers still are counted among the employed, but they’re working and earning less.
The number of retail jobs could plummet after December, Lardaro predicted. Although the state normally sheds about 12,000 retail jobs after the big holiday season, Lardaro said he expects more sizable layoffs this January.
“Even though Rhode Island has been in a recession, retail has held up pretty well,” he said. “But (the sector) is starting to show some definite weakness. I think once Christmas is over, you’re going to see even more cleaning out (of workers) than usual.”
