As we near the holiday months, retailers are starting their searches for seasonal workers. It was reported that last fall, retail stores hired 500,000 temporary workers, which was an improvement from the 350,000 workers hired for fall 2008. Both figures are weak compared to the 2006 pre-recession number of 750,000. This year, stores are expected to hire close to 600,000 temporary employees to help with the holiday shopping. Retailers are optimistic about the fact that they are in a better place than they were at this time last year and see the 0.3 percent in sales increase in July and the 0.4 percent increase in sales in August as reason to remain hopeful about the coming holiday shopping season. Nevertheless, retailers know that the recession is not as far behind them as they might like. Stores are continuing to be cautious because household wealth is recovering after it shrunk $100 billion in the first half of 2010. Where almost 15 million people are unemployed and household wealth is making a slow recovery, consumer spending is not expected to significantly increase.
I'm somewhat optimistic that these hiring numbers, at least for seasonal jobs like this, seem to be fairly rapidly approaching pre-recession levels. While this is hardly an indicator of full recovery, it's nice to know that at least some households, and more than last year, will have more income during the holiday season.
ReplyDeleteI think that it is a good sign and any step in recovery should be looked at as beneficial. I think its great that the amount of seasonal workers has increased since the recession, even though it is not at what it was pre recession at least it is steadily increasing
ReplyDeleteWhile I'd like to be optimistic about the increase in hiring for temporary workers, I feel that the firms should still be cautious. The small increase in sales in August could easily be attributed to "back-to-school" spending and the fact that for the first time in four quarters the household net worth has decreased, should be a warning sign that the Holiday season might not be as lucrative as it was pre-recession.
ReplyDeleteAt most stores, you can't even tell that there was a recession. Seasonal hiring is the most common for retailers, because let's face it, no one wants to work full time in retail and have that be their career. Forever 21 at Polaris alone just hired about 10 new people in 2 weeks for the summer season, and is only keeping on s few of those for regular part time jobs. They're already on the lookout for more seasonal workers too.
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