Every year, retailers race to hire workers to staff their stores and distribution centers to meet the demand that comes with millions of Americans shopping for Christmas and other winter holidays.
This seasonal hiring is often seen as a measure of the health of the retail industry and the U.S. economy more broadly.
On Wednesday, November data released by the Labor Department showed that seasonal hiring in 2024 in the retail trade sector was lower than a year earlier. But that may also reflect changes in how companies go about it.
The struggle to hire workers as the economy reopened in late 2020 and early 2021 led several retailers to start spreading out their hiring throughout the year, relying less on bringing on help rapidly in the weeks immediately before the holiday shopping season. Other retailers have said that they focus on offering their current workers more shifts before hiring seasonal workers.
Ahead of the 2024 holiday shopping season, major retailers like Target and Bath & Body Works said they expected their hiring of seasonal workers to be on a par with the year before. Macy’s said it aimed to hire 31,500 workers, slightly down from its target in 2023. Amazon said in October that it would hire 250,000 people to support its fulfillment and transportation operations, in line with its goal from the previous year. At Amazon, the jobs included full-time, part-time and seasonal positions.
For retailers, seasonal hiring does not take place just within stores. During the Covid pandemic, as a response to the boom in e-commerce shopping, retailers increasingly focused on hiring people to work within distribution centers that handled online orders.
Seasonal hiring has implications beyond December, as many retailers convert a certain percentage of temporary workers to permanent positions. Gap Inc., which also owns Banana Republic and Athleta, said one in 10 of its seasonal workers in 2024 was hired into a full-time position. More than half of Target’s seasonal workers were hired for full-time positions after the 2023 holiday shopping season.