Personnel

The tide is turning in retail. Despite staff and supply shortages that may burden shoppers and encumber stores during the holiday season, signs of growing optimism for the future abound. While last year the industry underwent a scourge of bankruptcies and closures, mid-year predictions suggest store openings could surpass store closings for the first time…

Americans quit their jobs at record rates in September, and the retail industry was no exception. The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed 685,000 people quit a retail job in September, at a rate of 4.4 percent. While this number is down from the 730,000 people who quit a retail job in…

The Biden administration said on Thursday that large companies (those with 100 or more employees) have until Jan. 4 to ensure that their workforces are fully vaccinated under a sweeping new coronavirus health measure that will cover 84 million private sector workers, including an estimated 31 million workers who are currently unvaccinated. The plan was…

E-commerce marketers have been preparing for the future of work for some time now — and it's not simply because they're digital natives. What do e-commerce marketers know that other pros don’t? I’ll unpack that idea by turning to research Sidecar published earlier this year, the 2021 E-commerce Marketer Survey. A key question we asked…

Why should employees wait for payday to gain access to wages already earned? Turns out that plenty of hourly workers at big-box retailers such as Target, Walmart, and Best Buy don’t have to if they tap into their earned wage access (EWA) benefits. EWA, particularly during the post-pandemic labor shortage in retail, is an attractive…

In the wake of the pandemic, workers across every industry — technology, healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality, etc. — are putting in their two-weeks notice in favor of better pay, increased flexibility and equitable working conditions. Dubbing it “The Great Resignation,” amongst the hardest hit by mass employee exodus is the retail industry. According to the U.S.…

Amazon.com announced last week that it will pay full tuition — including the cost of books and fees — for its more than 750,000 front-line employees. The retail giant will fund the 2022 initiative by investing $1.2 billion to expand its education and skills training benefits program by 2025. Rather than offering reimbursement after coursework completion, Amazon will…

For years, the federal government has debated raising the minimum wage to meet the increasing cost of living and offer more financial security to hourly workers, to no avail. Then Amazon.com moved to the center of the conversation in 2018 with the introduction of a minimum wage at $15 an hour. Recently, large retailers like…

The dust from the pandemic is finally settling, but a new storm is gathering for employers. U.S. quit rates are higher than ever, with an eye-popping 95 percent of workers saying they're considering changing jobs. If 2020 was full of talk about how to attract talent during a global pandemic, then 2021 will be about…

Walmart is offering special bonuses to many warehouse employees to work every hour they're scheduled and, in some cases giving temporary pay raises, as the country’s biggest retailer ramps up for the holiday shopping season with a tight labor market and stretched supply chains. According to The Wall Street Journal, the majority of Walmart’s 190 U.S. warehouses are offering…