Blog

The curse of retail for the last few years has been the relentless filling and re-filling of roles at every job level. Especially in Canada, which has historically ranked amongst the highest countries for retail employee turnover. Resumes showing more than 2 years at any one company are becoming rare. Fewer people working in retail trade According to the Labour Force Survey for September 2021 from Statistics Canada, employment fell by 20,000 (-0.9%) in retail trade, bringing employment in the industry to 3.1% (-71,000) below its February 2020 level. Despite the easing of many restrictions across Canada, employment in the industry has hovered around...

Retail Staffing: The Missing City Core Office Workers = No Customers The impact of the missing office workers in city cores is hard to understate. Not only are there few people to become potential customers to sell to, staffing for the cores has become a total nightmare. Why would anyone take a job that has 77% less customer sales potential than pre-COVID? Read that stat again! 77% of weekday office workers in Toronto's prestige Financial District have not returned to in-office work, and experts are saying that it may never recover to pre-pandemic numbers. How Does This Translate to Retail in the Area? Let's...

$15 per hour in Ontario too little too late While minimum wages vary greatly across the country, the "defacto" minimum wage Retailers are generally being forced to pay due to market supply falls between $17 to $20 per hour in Canada. It was very interesting to see the reaction to the news that the Ontario government is proposing a minimum wage increase to $15/hour starting in January; from the restaurant and hospitality sectors in particular. Jumping to offer the $15.00 per hour right now to get staff - they had few to no takers. As I mentioned in my last blog, the end...

Retail Staffing: CRB has ended and still no flood of people racing to get hired The prevailing thought amongst Retailers is that people prefer to stay home and earn CRB federal money, rather than work. They believed that when CRB ended and without that support, people would flood back to retail jobs. REALITY CHECK If they were going to do that, they would have done that a few weeks ago. The expectation was a massive rush of scared workers submitting resumes. It simply has not happened. About 50% of American states ended their special support for COVID-19 shut outs a few months ago. The...