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Retailers laid off workers in May as hotels, restaurants, and other seasonal services staffed up for the summer months.
In addition to newly penny-pinching consumers, many retailers have too much inventory on hand.
Stores placed orders in past months to meet consumer demand but were unable to get enough stock because of materials shortages at factories and supply line tangles.
Now that those items are arriving in stockrooms, inflation has risen so high that shoppers are beginning to cut back on purchases.
“It’s really difficult to get the right amount of product on the shelves today at the right price and also get the right amount of workers to match demand from consumers,” Jack Kleinhenz, the National Retail Federation’s chief economist, told The Wall Street Journal.
Retailers got rid of about 61,000 workers last month, the U.S. labor department reported, although the economy as a whole took on an additional 390,000 employees.
Walmart said it hired too many people in the post-COVID rush, a problem that is being solved “largely through attrition,” CEO Daniel McMillon said in a statement last month.
Amazon, a bottomless well of new jobs during the COVID War, has slowed its hiring.
Auto makers trimmed payrolls by 3,500 jobs last month. The industry continues to suffer from a shortage of key materials, especially computer chips, and rising interest rates are likely to crimp sales.
Tesla announced plans to pare its white-collar workforce by 10 percent, while Ford is looking to add 6,200 employees to its factory floors.
Many tech companies have frozen hiring or laid off staff.
Among the 390,000 jobs added in May, the information industry took on 16,000 new workers last month, growing its workforce by 5. 9 percent, slower than the 7.6 percent average over the previous 12 months.
Professional and business services hired 75,000; gas stations also expanded their payrolls.
TRENDPOST: Consumers, having spent the COVID War buying stuff, are now spending to have experiences—traveling, eating out, going to concerts, and so on, as we report in this issue in “China’s Exports Fall as World Shifts Spending Back to Services.”