Personnel

Amazon.com plans to offer permanent jobs to about 70 percent of the U.S. workforce it has hired temporarily to meet consumer demand during the coronavirus pandemic, the company told Reuters on Thursday. The world’s largest online retailer will begin telling 125,000 warehouse employees that they can keep their roles longer term. The remaining 50,000 workers…

Amazon.com and Target employees, on the front lines of COVID-19, are leading nationwide efforts to draw attention to the health risks they face delivering groceries and other critical supplies to Americans. Their approach? Planned sickouts. More than 350 Amazon warehouse workers in 50 locations pledged to call out from their jobs starting Tuesday, according to Athena, a coalition…

Total Retail is continuing its daily coverage of how retailers and brands are responding to the COVID-19 crisis and the impact it is having on their businesses. Here's the latest: Retailers are continuing to lay off and furlough workers due to the coronavirus uncertainty. Macy's announced this morning that the majority of employees for the Macy’s,…

With near record-low unemployment rates, most U.S. businesses are struggling to retain employees, and perhaps no industry is more challenged in this area than retail. The average turnover rate in the retail industry is just above 60 percent, according to the National Retail Federation. To combat high turnover rates, retailers are offering employees perks such as PayActiv Benefit, an employer-sponsored…

Walmart is testing out a higher minimum starting wage for certain jobs at about 500 of its stores as part of a broader overhaul of roles and responsibilities across its U.S. workforce. According to Bloomberg, Walmart is raising starting minimum hourly wages to $12 from $11. Under the retailer’s new operating model, dubbed “Great Workplace,” some…

The "gig economy" has taken the traditional hourly workforce by storm. 2019 has been a landmark year for the gig economy, with Lyft and Uber going public, and Postmates expected to do so in the near future. And with the number of gig workers forecast to keep growing, the traditional hourly workplace faces daunting competition…

The retail sector in today’s market is facing major disruption. Post-2009 depression, retailers have thrived and managed to hold their ground, but their employee recruiting and retention strategy is still struggling to get out of that phase. Even though they have several positions open throughout the year, it’s almost impossible to have 100 percent successful…

While attending the IRCE at RetailX conference in Chicago, Total Retail's Joe Keenan interviewed Daniel Alarik, founder and CEO of Grunt Style, a patriotic apparel brand. During the discussion, Alarik touches on his career shift from the military into retail, what influenced him to start Grunt Style, and why he values hiring military veterans. In addition, Alarik shares his…

We've written in the past about relationships between baby boomers and millennials and how they can productively co-exist or, better yet, jointly thrive in the workplace. Building on this premise, in this article we offer some thoughts about how and why baby boomers increasingly reinvent themselves later in life, as well as the challenges that…

The biggest e-commerce challenge of 2019 may be balancing marketing and sales channel innovation with the need for increasingly sophisticated fraud prevention. This will be especially challenging because fraud protection, like many aspects of business today, requires experience and fluency in working with data, and there's a growing shortage of data scientists across the U.S.…