Walmart Seasonal Hiring Plans Down 75% vs Last Year

Walmart plans to hire 40,000 employees for the upcoming holidays, a 75% drop from the retailer’s 150,000-worker target from last year.

Those workers will include seasonal store associates, full-time permanent truck drivers, and customer care workers, according to a Wednesday (Sept. 21) press release.

The company — America’s largest private employer — noted in the release that it will start by offering more hours to current employees before offering opportunities to people seeking temporary work. Last year’s announcement from Walmart showed that the company’s pre-holiday hiring plans were for primarily full-time, permanent positions.

The news comes at a moment when many consumers are cutting back on spending, believing inflation will linger long past the 2022 holiday shopping season, as research from PYMNTS has found.

Read more: New Survey Shows Consumers Less Optimistic Than Fed on Taming Inflation

The study showed the average consumer expects inflation to persist at its current rate for more than 22 months into the future. The most pessimistic consumers are those who live paycheck to paycheck and have issues paying bills, 28% of whom said they believe inflation will continue at its current rate for more than two years.

And nearly three in 10 consumers said the country has already entered a recession. As PYMNTS has noted, consumers’ perceptions are molded by the impact of inflation and labor conditions within their own ecosystem, no matter what economists say.

Speaking to PYMNTS’ Karen Webster earlier this week, former Saks Fifth Avenue CEO and Mastercard Senior Advisor Steve Sadove said consumers are in decent shape heading into the holiday shopping season — by some metrics.

See more: Q4 Retail Forecasts a Matter of Relativity and Details

“You get hung up in the detail if you look at it just on a month on month or even a month on last year, if you just want to look at that one-year performance,” he said. “Having said that, the lower-end consumer is feeling the pain enormously with fuel prices, with rents, some of the higher interest rates are just starting to hit people.”

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