Amazon said Tuesday it will hire 250,000 full- and part-time workers for the holiday season, a 67% increase compared to last year.
Target separately announced it will add nearly 100,000 seasonal positions over the holidays, the same number as last year.
The two companies' announcement follows news from Macy's Inc. on Monday that it will add more than 38,000 full- and part-time seasonal employees at its Macy's, Bloomingdale's and Bluemercury stores nationwide. That's a slight decrease from the 41,000 the company planned to add in 2022.
Amazon noted that more jobs are available because the company has opened more than 50 new fulfillment centers, delivery stations and same-day delivery sites in the U.S. this year. The e-commerce giant also wrote in a blog post that it will invest $1.3 billion this year in pay increases for warehouse and transportation employees, raising the average wage for those positions from $19 to more than $20.50 an hour. .
"The holiday season is always a special time at Amazon and we are excited to hire an additional 250,000 people this year to help serve customers across the country," said John Felton, Amazon's senior vice president of Worldwide Operations, in the post. Blog.
To capture consumers' attention, retailers like Amazon and Target have been offering holiday deals since October in recent years and are doing the same this year.
Consumer spending has been volatile this year after rising nearly 3% in January. Sales fell in February and March before recovering in the spring and summer. The Commerce Department said last week that retail sales rose 0.6% in August, driven in part by a big jump in gas prices.
Mastercard said in a report Tuesday that it expects U.S. retail sales, excluding automobiles, to rise 3.7% from November to the end of December, down from the 7.4% sales growth the company registered last year. Accounting firm Deloitte said in its own report last week that it expects holiday sales to increase between 3.5 and 4.6%.
