As firms struggle with seasonal hiring, Amazon turns to automation

 

TO BE HIRED as Santa Claus at Boscov’s, a department store in Pennsylvania, you will need to “be tolerant of unexpected behaviours from children”. But what really sets an applicant apart is a “natural white beard”. The insufficiently hirsute can apply for one of over 880,000 other holiday vacancies across America. The number of positions in retail is the highest since 2014. With consumer confidence close to an all-time peak, the National Retail Federation expects retailers to sell 4.3-4.8% more than last year in real terms, up from an average rise for the past five years of 3.9%.

Shops are looking for hordes of temporary staff to stock shelves, gift-wrap merchandise and say “ho ho ho” in the foyer. Among the biggest bricks-and-mortar retailers, a record number of 120,000 people are to be hired at Target. Macy’s is hiring 80,000. Since online sales are expected to be a fifth higher than last year, UPS, FedEx and DHL are recruiting furiously, too.

The tightest jobs market in over a decade means more disposable income, and therefore more consumption. But it also makes it harder to find temporary staff. At the end of the summer there were over a million more open positions nationwide than people looking for work. Kohl’s, a retailer, started hiring holiday workers in June to get a head start. UPS has hosted its first one-day hiring blitz to enlist 40,000 temporary workers, with interviews and driving-test sign-ups in nearly 170 locations. J.C. Penney, a department-store chain, is luring seasonal workers by entering them in a raffle for gifts and holidays. Amazon is hiring hourly workers via an online form, without résumés or interviews.

Rising wages across the economy help make seasonal work more worthwhile. Amazon is in the vanguard: it raised its hourly minimum to $ 15 from November 1st. Following the announcement, says Pawel Adrjan of Indeed, the world’s most-visited jobs site, the number of searches for jobs with Amazon in America tripled. It has stayed high since.

Temporary summer jobs, many of them in agriculture, are often taken by migrants who return home afterwards. Temporary winter jobs, by contrast, more often go to locals. The difference is in part because winter work usually requires language skills and is less likely to be covered by special visa schemes, says Andrew Chamberlain of Glassdoor, an employer-review site.

All this points to a merry Christmas for job-seeking Americans. But the tight jobs market is speeding up a longer-run trend, which may in time flatten seasonal spikes in demand for labour. That is automation. Amazon is ahead of the pack here, too. It is hiring 20,000 fewer workers in America this winter compared with last year, which Mark May, an analyst at Citigroup, attributes to greater use of robots in the retail giant’s fulfilment centres.

Since many retail and delivery tasks are ripe for automation, this trend could terminate swathes of holiday jobs. That would make the season less of a scramble for employers. But the economy as a whole could lose out in a less obvious way. Many people need extra cash over Christmas, and the annual hiring binge means they can easily find work. Some decide to continue, even if that had not been the original plan. UPS says that it ends up hiring a third of its seasonal package-handlers for permanent jobs. Holiday work thus acts as a path from economic inactivity into the labour force. At least robots cannot grow beards.

This article appeared in the Finance and economics section of the print edition under the headline “Spirit of Christmas yet to come”