Kroger Goes On A Hiring Spree

Kroger is doubling down on its human capital coming soon — the massive grocery chain has announced it will be hiring some 11,000 employees across its various supermarket brands. That hiring binge will extend to Fred Meyer locations, as well as Mariano’s Fresh Market. Of the 11,000 roles on offer, almost 2,000 will reportedly be management positions.

That position roster only includes permanent employees — workers brought in as part of a capital improvement project are not counted as part of this tally. Such jobs, like construction work, are a separate column — as are employees added to the headcount because of merger’s made by the firm.

The news comes as rumors began to circulate that Kroger was on the verge of having a major protest outside of its Cincinnati HQ. The protest was reportedly to be led by Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. over the coming closure of grocery stores that serve minority communities.

Kroger’s planned hiring pick-up follows the pace it has made in recent years, getting to its nearly 450,000 employee-base nationwide. The retailer brought in about 12,000 new workers in 2016, and an additional 10,000 in 2017.

Still, Kroger adding to its rolls comes as a piece of good news, particularly as reports are emerging that job growth experienced an unexpected slowdown in March 2018, though unemployment remains steady at just over 4 percent. Not entirely to the surprise of the market, some predicted contraction was highly predictable for the third month of 2018.

“We’ve had such unsustainably strong results in January and February that it was largely expected that we were due for some payback,” said Ellen Zentner, chief United States economist for Morgan Stanley, reported The New York Times. “The weak number in headline payrolls does not change the fact that trend-job growth is strong.”