As the economic recovery gains steam, the retail industry is expected to be one of the strongest for job growth this decade. But the quality of jobs selling clothes, computers, and other goods has declined in recent years to the point where few can be classified as careers.
Erratic part-time hours often make a second job impossible and complicate the work-life juggle. Pay has shrunk. And the recession created hordes of overqualified job seekers, leaving existing staff with little power to demand better conditions.
With unemployment at 8.8 percent, many people feel fortunate to land any job. But not all jobs contribute the same to growth. Employers may be hiring more, but they are hiring disproportionately in retail and other service-sector positions with low wages and few benefits.
High-paying fields like real estate and finance accounted for 40 percent of the 8.8 million jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 14 percent of the jobs created in the year that followed. Lower-paying industries like retail constituted 23 percent of jobs lost but almost half of the recent growth.
This shift “could make it much harder for workers to find family-supporting jobs,’’ says Annette Bernhardt of the National Employment Law Project. Even in the “jobless recovery’’ after the 2001 recession, high-paying industries accounted for nearly one-third of new jobs in the year after the recession ended.
Elizabeth Murphy, a recruiting manager for Crate & Barrel, gets three times as many applications as a year and a half ago. The increase reflects, in part, a surge in applications from unemployed real estate agents, accountants, and other professionals.
Stores are under pressure to trim expenses, and labor, the biggest expense after inventory, is one of the few they can control. In 2006, the median hourly wage in retail sales was $9.50, the government says. In 2009, the most recent year for which figures are available, it was $9.74 — a 4 percent drop after adjusting for inflation. For full-time retail workers, the median annual wage was $20,510 — below the federal poverty line for a family of four.
The government’s March unemployment report showed that after adjusting for inflation, wages are falling.
Retail workers aren’t just teenagers seeking pocket money. In New York City, for example, 78 percent are 25 or older, and more than a third are their family’s sole provider, says James Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute.
Not every retail employee is struggling. At Nordstrom Inc. stores, top performers earn six figures. But electronics stores that offer workers a cut of sales, like hhgregg and P.C. Richard & Son, have had to lower prices to compete with Amazon.com, squeezing take-home pay.
