Macy’s and Dick’s Join Retailers in Trimming Holiday Hiring

Retailers and other employers who engage in seasonal hiring are facing a season of rising prices, reduced consumer spending and worries about a recession.

As Barrons reported Sunday, this has led some retailers to cut back on hiring seasonal workers this year or to simply not release hiring goals for 2022.

Related: Dick’s, Macy’s Join Mounting Retail Seasonal Hiring Trend; Staffing Shortages Loom

PYMNTS noted last month that Dick’s Sporting Goods planned to hire 9,000 seasonal workers, a figure that’s 10% lower than the number the company’s hiring target for 2021. Last year, the sporting goods retailer said it would hire the most seasonal associates in its history.

Macy’s plans to hire more than 41,000 workers for seasonal positions in stores, supply chain locations, and call centers — a number the company said was “relatively consistent” with the number of workers hired in previous years.

And Walmart in September announced plans to hire 40,000 seasonal workers — a figure that’s 75% lower than its holiday target for 2021.

Read more: As Inflation Rages, Walmart Announces Month-Long Sales Event

PYMNTS reported last week that Walmart and a number of other retailers were launching earlier than usual holiday shopping deals in an effort to entice customers at a moment when many of them are reducing their spending.

While the actual response to these offerings and anticipation has yet to be seen, a number of recent retail forecasts have suggested this year’s shopping season will be somewhat muted.

Among those predictions was that of Adobe Analytics, which said earlier this month that online spending in the holiday shopping season would likely grow by just 2.5% this year, marking the lowest growth since the company began monitoring this spending in 2015. It’s also possible that spending in some categories could even decline.

The report stated that while consumers raced to buy goods in 2021 because of concerns about supply chain issues, they’re likely to level back on spending this year due to inflation.

Around the same time, buy now, pay later (BNPL) company Affirm released a projection showing that while consumers would indeed begin shopping earlier, they would look for discounts and cut back spending on gifts for coworkers.