‘The Big Quit' Roils Retail

Retailers are still short hundreds of thousands of workers. Here’s how the turnover is impacting merchants—and their employees

- By Kerri Anne Renzulli

The great resignation has been hammering the retail industry hard for months. Merchants are scrambling for employees and wringing their hands about how they’re going to get enough staff to run the registers, stock shelves and work in the warehouses.

The labor shortage, of course, isn’t ideal for retail businesses, or companies who sell products directly to consumers. But it can be a good thing for their employees, who are using their in-demand status to land higher wages and better benefits. And, for job hunters, the perks aren’t the only thing improving. Some retailers are relaxing job qualifications, making it easier to find a new gig.

With the retail industry navigating more than 880,000 open jobs right now, these new terms of employment won’t be changing soon. Here’s the current landscape.

Retail's Staffing Issues

In February, 4.9 percent of the retail sector’s workforce—some 771,000 employees—quit their jobs in a single month, a high for a field well accustomed to turnover. But that exodus is far from an anomaly. Beginning in April 2021, at least 4 percent of retail workers began ditching their jobs each month. At no other point in the BLS’s 20-plus years of record keeping did the quit rate ever top 4 percent for retail or did more than 600,000 retail employees voluntarily drop out in a single month.

“Retail workers aren’t satisfied with the pay for the risks they’ve had to take and still are taking,” says Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents 1.3 million workers in the United States and Canada.