Macy’s Inc. is hiring more temporary workers for the holiday season this year to fulfill online orders for home delivery or in-store pickup.
The department store chain announced today plans to hire 86,000 seasonal workers for the holiday season, a 3.6% increase from 83,000 last year. That includes hiring 10,000 to work in online fulfillment centers, versus 7,000 last year, a spokesman says. Plus, for the first time Macy’s is hiring 3,000 temporary employees for its stores to fulfill orders placed online for store pickup, ship online orders from stores and handle in-store returns of web orders.
“Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s are favorite places to shop throughout the holidays, and we strive to welcome and serve our customers with a consistently high level of care and attention, whether they are shopping in stores, online via desktop or on mobile devices,” Terry J. Lundgren, Macy’s chairman and CEO, said in a statement.
The one area where Macy’s is hiring fewer temporary employees this year for a direct-to-consumer function is in its contact centers. The company will hire 1,125 workers to handle phone calls, e-mails and web charts with customers from four customer service centers in Mason, OH; Clearwater, FL; Tempe, AZ; and St. Louis. Last year, Macy’s hired 1,500 temporary workers for those facilities. The company does not need to hire as many this year because it has a larger year-round staff, a spokesman says. He did not disclose how many employees work in those contact centers.
Macy’s, No. 8 in the 2014 Internet Retailer Top 500, operates direct-to-consumer fulfillment centers in Martinsburg, WV; Goodyear, AZ, Portland, TN, and Cheshire, CT, as well as product-specific fulfillment centers, handling items such as furniture, in Sacramento, CA; Stone Mountain, GA; Secaucus, NJ; and Joppa, MD.
Macy’s is hiring extra workers to handle fulfillment in its store this year now that it has completed the rollout of its buy online, pickup in store program. Consumers also can return online orders to the 800 Macy’s and 37 Bloomingdale’s stores nationwide owned by Macy’s Inc.
The hiring reflects a series of investments by Macy’s to enable consumers to move easily between buying, ordering and returning items online and in stores. More initiatives are coming this fall, including a test of same-day delivery from Macy’s stores and, in October, Macy’s joining several other retailers in letting shoppers pay in stores with their new iPhone 6 smartphones from Apple Inc., using the Apple Pay pay-with-a-wave system Apple announced this month.
Because consumers so often now research online and then buy in stores, try items on in stores and then order at Macys.com or from the retailer’s mobile app, or have store employees place online orders for them of items not available in a particular store, Macy’s no longer breaks out online orders. “The way the business runs today, how do you tell?” a spokesman says. “We see it all as an integrated business.”
Internet Retailer estimates Macy’s generated $4.15 billion in online orders in 2013, an increase of 31% from $3.168 billion the prior year.
Macy’s is not alone in hiring thousands of workers in anticipation of more direct-to-consumer orders this coming holiday season. Apparel retail chain Kohl’s Inc., No. 23 in the Top 500, announced this month it would take on 9,300 seasonal workers in its online distribution centers. Kohl’s also announced in August plans to use its 800 stores to fulfill online orders during the holiday season.
In addition, the two major national delivery services, FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service of America Inc., have announced they will hire tens of thousands of seasonal workers this fall in anticipation of strong online retail orders. UPS, which accepted some responsibility for orders arriving late around Christmas last year, also disclosed it will have 10% more doors for loading trucks during this holiday season. UPS and FedEx are among the leaders in e-commerce technology and services vendors serving Internet Retailer’s Top 1000 merchants as measured by annual web sales.
Favorite