California employers may be keeping the seasonal staff to a minimum this year:
“We haven’t seen any uptick in employment headcount for the retail sector in October.”
Esmael Adibi is director of the A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University. He says holiday sales are expected to increase two to three percent this year. He says even though that’s positive for the economy, it may explain why stores aren’t hiring heavily:
“Increase of two and three percentage points could be handled by existing employees, just get a little bit - squeeze a little bit more out of them by giving overtime rather than hiring new people.”
Adibi says retailers may have opted to wait until November to do seasonal hiring this year – so next month’s unemployment figures could tell a different story – but ordinarily he says we’d see such hiring in October.