Sold on Seasonal Jobs : Layoff Victims and Others Are Starting to Look at Low-Paying Retail Posts as Their Chance for a New Beginning

Jim Scolastico was on top of the world last year, a 25-year-old sales rep making $50,000 a year with a generous expense account and the freedom to set his own schedule.

Then came The Layoff. Today he’s putting in draining 10-hour days for less than half his former pay, working as a holiday-season salesman at a Good Guys consumer electronics store in Studio City.

Is the new job a comedown from his recent glory days? Sure. But Scolastico also sees it as something else: a fresh start.

While seasonal retailing jobs have long been snapped up by students and housewives looking for extra dollars to buy Christmas presents, they now are also attracting layoff victims and others struggling to find work in Southern California’s miserable job market.

Some of these unemployed workers once scoffed at working in the traditionally low-paying retail industry. But many find that as their savings and patience run out, a retailing job--even a temporary one--means financial relief, a foot in the door at a new employer and an opportunity to begin a new career.

“You get to the point where you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” said Scolastico, who was unemployed for seven months before finding work at Good Guys.

“I was trying to find something comparable (to my last job), and I spun my wheels for quite a few months,” he said. So Scolastico decided to “go back down to the bottom, start over again and work my way back up” at a growing retail chain.

Southland retailers say they have received applications from a bumper crop of unusually well-qualified--some would say overqualified--candidates for holiday-season jobs as well as permanent positions. The seasonal jobs typically pay anywhere from the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour to perhaps $6.50 an hour, although some salespeople drawing commissions can earn twice that much.

At the Sears store in Cerritos, store manager Jeff Sackett reports that people with backgrounds as teachers, lab technicians and computer consultants have come in recently looking for work.

“You normally see a lot of applicants, but the number who are qualified to do the job is better, a lot better,” Sackett said.

At the same time, the demand for temporary workers is strong. Many retailers that have slashed their permanent staffs to the bare minimum now need to hire seasonal workers by the dozen to handle extra business during the holidays.

And when temporary hires perform well, they often land permanent jobs. Even though most retailers cut their staffs in January after the Christmas shopping blitz is over, “we always have room for a good person,” Sackett said.

Take, for example, Shelly O’Keefe, who in October applied for a holiday job at Sears in Cerritos simply as a financial stopgap.

O’Keefe, 28, was a legal secretary for a law firm for about 18 months but found the work depressing and quit. With little savings to draw on, she quickly needed a new job to support herself and her two children. So O’Keefe took a part-time seasonal job with Sears “just to get by, so I could figure out what I was going to do,” she said.

Within three weeks, however, O’Keefe happily accepted a permanent, full-time sales job in the store’s cosmetics department. “Once I got here, I enjoyed everything about it,” she said.

It took Phyllis McDaniels, 57, far longer overcome her resistance to working in retail. For 15 years, she managed a nonprofit human tissue bank, and after quitting to try something new, she expected to find a job paying near the $45,000 a year she previously earned.

But more than a year of job hunting persuaded McDaniels that it was time to take a fresh look at retailing, a field she thought she left permanently when she started working for the tissue bank.

She applied for a Christmas opening at Robinsons-May in the Westminster Mall and wound up landing a permanent job there.

“When I came back to retailing, my life started again. I didn’t realize how much I missed it,” said McDaniels, upbeat even though she now earns less than half what she did in her previous job.

At Good Guys, Scolastico is optimistic that he will latch on as a permanent employee too. Eventually he wants to move into management, and figures the chain’s continuing expansion will create ample opportunity.

Job hunters are also attracted to some retailing jobs by the prospect of health insurance and other benefits. Scolastico is thinking about going to law school while he works, and would take advantage of a Good Guys tuition reimbursement program if he becomes a permanent employee.

For newcomers to retailing, however, the adjustment isn’t always easy. Scolastico said he joined Good Guys with the idea that “if I can sell a $1-million account, I could certainly sell a Walkman.” Now, he said, he has “newfound respect for retail salespeople.”

One of his toughest adjustments was switching from the long-term business relationships he had with clients as an auto equipment sales rep to the transitory dealings with customers common in retailing.

Still, Scolastico has no complaints about his new job. After seven months of unemployment, he explained, “it’s great to have a place to go to work.”