Wal-Mart to hire more than 50,000

New York: Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the world’s largest retailer, will hire more than 50,000 temporary workers in its US stores for the holiday shopping season.

Current store employees also will be offered more hours of work, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company said today in a statement. Ashley Hardie, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, declined to comment on how the hiring plan compares to last year.

Wal-Mart joins Target Corp in adding workers for a holiday season that researcher ShopperTrak forecasts will feature similar sales gains as last year. Holiday retail sales in the US may rise 3.3 per cent this year, compared with 3.7 per cent last year, the researcher said earlier this month.

“Consumers are in better shape than they were last year, but there has been no big improvement,” said John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc, a human resources consulting firm based in Chicago. That should lead to an increase in temporary hiring at US retailers by as much as 5 per cent, he said.

Target, the second-largest US discounter after Wal-Mart, said it would add as many as 90,000 part-time workers in its stores and distribution centres. The chain had about 92,000 seasonal workers last year. Target has more than 1,700 stores in the US, while Wal-Mart has more than 3,000.

Wal-Mart declined 0.4 per cent to $74.45 (Dh273) at the close in New York. The shares have gained 25 per cent this year.

Kohl’s Increases Hiring

Kohl’s Corp, the third-largest US department-store chain, said last week it will hire more than 52,700 workers for the holidays, an increase of more than 10 per cent from a year earlier. Kohl’s has more than 1,100 locations in the US.

The holiday shopping season that begins in November is the largest period for purchases during the year for retailers. So-called Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, was named so because it was traditionally when retailers would become profitable.

Wal-Mart may increase sales 5.1 per cent to $129.4 billion in the quarter ending January 31, according to the average of analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. That would account for 27 per cent of its projected annual revenue of $472 billion.

Holiday hiring has been increasing since retailers cut workers during the recession in 2008, according to an analysis of government data by the National Retail Federation. Seasonal employees increased 7.9 per cent to 607,000 last year, the NRF said. Part-time employees reached 688,000 in 2007 and then dropped 61 per cent the next year.