WALMART HAS HIRED HALF A MILLION PEOPLE SINCE MARCH.
Walmart (WMT), which has already hired more than 500,000 workers in stores and across its supply chain since March to meet growing demand in the pandemic, said Wednesday that it will hire more than 20,000 seasonal workers in e-commerce fulfillment centers across the country "to prepare for an expected increase in online shopping." Walmart has stores every year that bring on seasonal associates, according to a spokesperson, but the last time Walmart hired a "large number of seasonal associates" was in 2015, when it added 60,000 holiday workers for stores.
The overall hiring forecast for this holiday season "remains uncertain," but "it is clear that the proportion of sales that are made online will reach record levels and that may cause a permanent change in the future of holiday hiring," Andy Challenger, senior vice president at outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in an email.
Shoppers have bought more goods online in recent months as they spend an increasing amount of time at home and limit their trips to stores. E-commerce sales for the second quarter of 2020 increased 31% to $211.5 billion from the previous quarter, the Commerce Department said last month. E-commerce made up 16.1% of US retail sales last quarter, up from 11.8% in the prior quarter.
Deloitte predicted last week that e-commerce sales will grow between 25% and 35% from November to January to up to $196 billion compared with last year.
"E-commerce is likely to be a big winner because consumers have shown a clear movement towards buying online rather than at brick and mortar stores," Daniel Bachman, Deloitte's US economic forecaster, said in a research report last week.