With holiday shopping and entertaining squarely in view, many retailers and hospitality businesses are increasing staff levels to deal with expected demand.

Holiday spending this year is expected to reach its highest point since the Great Recession, increasing 10 percent compared with the 2015 holiday season, according to PwC’s 2016 Holiday Outlook.

“The great news for all retailers is consumers are much more optimistic this holiday season,” Steven Barr, PwC’s U.S. retail and consumer leader, said in a news release from the firm. “They are expected to spend 10 percent more on gifts, travel and entertainment.”

But with employment levels locally and across the state, at what the federal government considers “full employment,” will there be many hands to make light work of this busy shopping and entertaining season?

Officials at Wilmington’s Whole Foods Market already are working on their strategy. The grocery store typically sees a significant increase in business related to Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s holidays, but believes it has reliable staffing resources to draw upon.

“We have a pool of former team members that want to remain active with Whole Foods Market even though they are not year-round employees,” said Chelsea Thornhill, the store’s marketing and community liaison.

Knowledge of store operations and familiarity with both brands and products allows these former fulltime workers to step back in easily in busy times, Thornhill said.

Nationally, however, retailers are competing for those seasonal workers in a tighter worker market, according to an Oct. 24 report from the Society for Human Resource Management. The organization has found that the lowest unemployment rate in years and rising wages for the nation’s lowest-paid workers mean a smaller pool of candidates is available.

“While the unemployment rate has decreased to 5 percent, the labor participation rate remains about the same at 62.9 percent,” the report states. The report also cites Peter Harrison, CEO of Snagajob, a job search engine website as saying “This means that the supply of available workers is decreasing, while the competition among employers to attract workers is increasing.”

Some local businesses have been surprised by a lack of worker availability.

“Typically I don’t hire seasonal workers, but this year I put out some media feelers for gift wrappers, and I have gotten zero responses,” said John Jordan, owner of Protocol, a home goods and gift boutique in midtown Wilmington. “I thought for sure I would get three or four.”

Jordan said his staff’s product knowledge and established relationships with customers is essential to Protocol’s success. It would be a challenge for a new salesperson to learn all that in a short, busy time period.

“I would have a hard time training somebody for a short time and then letting them go, so [I and my staff] tend to beef up our own schedules,” he said.

While he’s fortunate to have adequate sales staff in place for the holiday season, Jordan is still puzzling how to find gift wrappers. And he said he has heard from other specialty shop owners that 2016 has been “one of the worst years” for trying to find qualified help and believes that many potential employees just don’t understand the critical importance to brick-and-mortar retailers of building customer relationships.

“It’s what distinguishes us from a click,” he said, referring to the attraction of shopping online.

Jordan’s observations are borne out in results from Snagajob’s recent survey of businesses.

Snagajob reported that 82 percent of respondents said they experience challenges filling temporary holiday positions. The most common challenges cited are a lack of qualified workers (44 percent), a lack of available workers (34 percent) and competition from other employers (30 percent).

Knowledgeable, friendly staff and extra services like gift wrapping are essential for shops like Protocol if they are to compete with “major dot-com destinations,” according to PwC’s Barr.

“The challenge for store-based retailers will likely be to leverage their distinctive advantages to stay relevant,” he said in the release. “Small, independent retailers and local artisans are expected to compete for consumers by offering personal service as well as unique and handmade gifts.”

Tommy Mills has also been surprised this year by worker behavior. The owner of Little Pond Caterers has a core group of about eight employees, which is partly supplemented for the holiday season by a pool of occasional workers: high school and college students, stay-at-home moms looking to earn extra money for the holidays and even a few retirees.

Normally, by late October, he would start hearing from those individuals, asking what opportunities he has for them. He usually also gets a few cold calls from people he doesn’t know, but who are looking for holiday work.

“I haven’t been getting those calls,” he said in early November.

Fortunately for Little Pond Caterers, there is a regular pool of experienced catering workers that several catering businesses share. Thanks to these individuals, Mills said, he is staffed for the full schedule of jobs he has booked through the end of the year.

Not everyone is seeing a worker squeeze, however.

YS Talent in Wilmington, which places permanent, part-time and seasonal workers, is seeing no change this year from previous ones. It even saw an uptick in temporary employment by Halloween-related stores, according to Worth Merritt, the agency’s business development manager.

“We have a lot of interest in finding seasonal jobs from candidates.
Regardless of the published unemployment rate we are not having difficulty recruiting for seasonal employees,” he said, adding that YS Talent has also seen no evidence that businesses are offering incentives to lure seasonal workers.

“We have employees that look forward to returning each year,” Merritt said. “Seasonal work gives them the flexibility they are seeking while providing them with income to meet their specific goals.”

YS Talent places these individuals in retail and hospitality establishments, and its labor pool is broadly representative of the population, according to Merritt.

“We see candidates from all walks of life that seek seasonal employment, especially with the holidays approaching,” he said. “Many people are earning extra income to fund Christmas for their families; others have a variety of reasons for their interest in seasonal work.”