Stores Short on Workers for Holiday Rush
Attention, holiday shoppers: Good luck finding a sales clerk.
Year after year, shoppers have been complaining about dwindling customer service and long lines, especially during the mad holiday rush. But thanks to the extraordinarily tight labor market, this winter might be one for the record books.
Despite a flurry of recruiting efforts, many retailers will be more short-handed this season than ever, say industry analysts and executives.
That will only exacerbate matters at many stores, which have been thinly staffed all year as retailers struggle to contain overhead costs and to find and retain workers who often have better options in this booming economy.
“I’ve been in business for 37 years and I’ve never seen it like this,” says Gordon Segal, chief executive of Crate & Barrel, the national housewares and furniture seller, which, like every other retailer, is scrambling to fill holiday openings. “That’s everybody’s worst nightmare right now.”
Adds Kurt Barnard, publisher of Barnard’s Retail Trend Report: “If you want to do holiday shopping, for heaven’s sake do it now before the crowds start mounting.”
Mall operators and merchants, preparing for what’s likely to be the strongest holiday sales period in a decade, are holding job fairs, offering bigger employee discounts, pulling resumes off the Internet and even asking customers if they want to work. But with just a week to go before the official start of Christmas shopping, expectations have already been lowered.
“You don’t have to have a lot of drive and moxie” to get hired, says David Small, manager of J.C. Penney in the Glendale Galleria. Small is offering those with no experience $6 to $6.25 an hour, at least a quarter more than last year. He needs 150 seasonal workers. “I think we’ll be OK.”
Others aren’t so confident.
Vicky Lanart, manager of Vitamin World in the Ontario Mills outlet center, says labor has been a constant struggle. If there are lapses in service in retail shops, she says, it’s partly because young workers aren’t sticking around. She says she’ll hire four people, and before she’s done training them, two others will have left.
“They’ll job jump for a quarter,” Lanart says. Her workers start at $5.75 an hour, California’s minimum wage, but with commissions they can earn $7.75 an hour, she says.
At a mall-sponsored job fair last Saturday, Lanart sat at a table waiting for workers. After more than two hours, she had just three applications.
Job Seekers Pick and Choose
Other merchants at Ontario Mills, especially those popular with teenagers, such as Pacific Sunwear and Nautica, saw far more activity. Even so, it was clear that job seekers were as picky as employers, if not more so.
Justin Tibbetts, a 17-year-old senior at Alta Loma High School, filled out one application, for a sales clerk opening at Sports Authority. But he said it was no big deal if he didn’t land the job. He didn’t need it, he said, nor was his family pressing him to earn money.
“Younger kids are more affluent, the product of dual-income families,” says Bruce Van Kleeck, vice president at the National Retail Federation. “They don’t need the work, so it’s really a challenge.”
Last holiday season was no cakewalk either. But retailers muddled through, and for all the customer grumbling, sales were robust. So far this year, consumer spending has been even stronger. But if stores have too few workers on hand this holiday season, they could see sales losses. Existing sales clerks and floor managers are bracing for high-pressure duty.
“Up until January I may have to work crazy hours,” says Danny Harris, 46, who just landed a full-time job at the Gap in Santa Monica Place.
Harris got the job after attending a workshop sponsored by the mall and Santa Monica College. He is starting at $8 an hour, and he’s excited about embarking on a new career. But there are seemingly fewer and fewer people who share his enthusiasm. The retail workshop Harris attended was set up for 40 participants, but only 12 showed up.
Retailers aren’t simply victims of the tight labor market. Their work force pains also reflect the industry’s continuing push to sell more with less, especially in California.
Through October, retail employment statewide was up by just 1% from 1998, even though taxable sales surged by 9% from last year’s brisk levels.
Part of that gap may be explained by productivity gains. The latest Census Bureau data indicate that the number of department stores and other general merchandise stores in California--about 2,400--and their total work force remained virtually flat from 1992 to 1997. Yet their sales jumped by 20% in the same period.
Small, the Penney’s manager, can attest to this squeeze. When he took over at the Glendale store in 1992, he had 15 full-time support staff who sat with adding machines on their desks, producing sales and other reports. Today his office staff is down to four, as those tasks have been centralized and are now done by computers.
That’s not all. Small says he has fewer workers on the sales floor, too. The women’s shoe department, for example, has 15 workers, down from about 25 seven years ago. Still, he says, “the cost of labor has gone up faster than incremental sales.”
So it’s not surprising that customers at many stores are waiting longer. Janet Austin, an analyst at California’s Employment Development Department, says the scarcity of salespeople also reflects the emergence of the Home Depots and other so-called big-box retailers in California. Those stores generally have fewer workers per square foot than other retailers, yet they have expanded aggressively in California at the expense of many mom-and-pop shops.
Then there’s electronic commerce, which is putting increasing pressure on traditional retail stores to keep prices down and operate more efficiently. Yet frustration with poor service in stores is driving more shoppers to the Internet.
Even with all those pressures, many retailers are not investing enough, in pay or training, to build a good sales staff, and analysts say all that will come home to roost during the holidays.
Tony Cherbak, a retail specialist at Deloitte & Touche in Costa Mesa, remembers going into a discount music store not long ago and asking for a certain videotape. The clerk said the store didn’t have it and then left, never bothering to check the warehouse, say when it might be available or suggest where else Cherbak might find it. Cherbak walked out, miffed.
“All you got was a breathing body to check you out,” he says.
In their defense, retail clerks often don’t have a lot of support or incentives. Most don’t get a sales commission, they’re on their feet all day and they work crummy hours for relatively little pay.
Workers’ Pay in California Is Up
More recently, as California’s jobless rate has fallen to a 30-year low, employers have been bumping up pay to attract or keep workers. In October, average earnings for all retail trade employees in California were almost $11 an hour, a 3% jump from a year earlier. But the average retail workweek remains about 30 hours.
So with few exceptions, notably car salespeople (who earned an average $43,000 last year), the typical retail worker generally can’t expect to pull down more than $25,000 a year. At department stores, where about 232,000 Californians worked last year, annual pay averaged about $17,000, according to government payroll statistics.
Eve Shelby, a single mother, was looking for work last week at Chrysalis, a nonprofit agency in Los Angeles that helps homeless and long-term unemployed find work. Shelby deliberately passed over the many retail jobs.
“I’m looking more for office work,” she said.
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Times staff writer Leslie Earnest contributed to this story.
