Retail sector’s job apocalypse

You may remember, early this year, a spate of gloomy reportage about the coming collapse of retail jobs due to automation and online shopping. This wasn’t just a dystopian forecast: Employment in the retail sector fell for seven straight months starting in January. A streak like that hadn’t happened outside of a recession since the early days of World War II.
Since August, though, retail employment is up by an estimated 28,200 jobs, with 18,700 added just in November (these numbers are seasonally adjusted, meaning that the increase reflects something more than the usual Christmas-season retail hiring binge).
As you can see, it’s not much of a rebound. Retailing employment is still growing more slowly than employment in the rest of the economy. But it’s not spiraling downward. Not yet, at least.
A lot of the focus this year has been on shopping-mall stalwarts such as department stores and clothing retailers, which have been struggling. But that doesn’t mean that every retailer has been. Here’s what’s happened to employment since 2000 in those and three other retailing sectors that overlap with them to some extent:
Department stores and electronics and appliance stores have been in long declines; clothing and clothing accessories stores seem to have gone in and out of style. Nonstore retailers (mainly online retailers and mail-order houses) have after a long post-dot-com hangover been adding jobs at a fast pace but from a low base. Warehouse clubs and supercenters have made spectacular job gains since 2000, but they’ve been pretty flat lately. And yes, in case you’re wondering, “all other general merchandise stores” — the category that includes the likes of Dollar General and Family Dollar — has seen big employment gains since 2000 but
declines since January.
Retailing is always going through these kinds of sectoral shifts, and the fact that lots of stores have been closing does not in itself signal a looming collapse of retail employment. That said, retailing’s share of overall nonfarm employment has actually been declining for decades:
The 1970s and 1980s, it appears, were retailing’s boom decades — relative to the rest of the economy, at least. The subsequent reallocation of employment away from retail that began in the early 1990s shows no signs of abating. It may be accelerating. But that’s not quite the same thing as a retail apocalypse.

—Bloomberg