‘Tis the season to be jolly. That is, unless you’re a worker who was banking on getting a seasonal job and haven’t been able to find one this season.
Every year, American retailers hire extra help as the holiday shopping season approaches. In recent years, these jobs have numbered roughly around half a million per season. These seasonal jobs run the gamut. Think temporary cashiers, gift wrappers, sales associates, greeters, merchandisers, warehouse unloaders, delivery drivers.But the quintessential – and most iconic – seasonal worker has got to be… Santa claus. In addition to sliding down chimneys to deliver presents on Christmas, Jolly Old Saint Nicholas takes gigs at places like malls, department stores, corporate events, and private parties in the weeks leading up to Dec. 25.
However, this year, Santa may be making fewer trips from the North Pole than in years past. As we report in this week’s *Planet Money* newsletter, demand for professional Santas seems to have cooled. It’s one small part of a broader decline in the demand for seasonal workers this holiday season.It got us wondering how the market for Santas fluctuates with the business cycle, which sectors of the Santa market are recession-proof, and whether a decline in Santa demand this season could be a sign that the U.S. economy is going down the chimney.
The Grinch that stole Santa visits
Mitch Allen is the founder and “Head Elf” at Hire Santa, an agency that provides Santas for holiday events around the nation and world (we talked to Allen in a past *Planet Money* newsletter). Allen estimates there are probably around nine or ten thousand professional or “near professional” Santa Clauses in the united States.
Sure, Allen says, his company may occasionally get requests for Santa at “Christmas in July”-style events, when Santa shows up in a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops. But, no surprise, prime time for his business is right now. He says demand for Santa typically begins in early November, picks up steam on weekends in December and explodes the week before Christmas, especially on Christmas Eve.”it really falls off after Christmas Eve, like midnight Christmas Eve,” Allen says.
Allen says he’s seeing less demand for Santa visits this season. His leadTrying to figure out what the heck the economy really looks like right now.
But there are some candles illuminating what’s going on – and this seeming decline in demand for Santa could be one small sign suggesting that the overall economy is slowing down. It’s part of a broader decline in the demand for seasonal workers this year, something a number of sources have reported in recent weeks. For instance,in late September,Challenger,Gray & Christmas,a human-resources firm,released their annual seasonal hiring report. They projected that hiring this holiday retail season would “fall to its lowest point since the recession-hit season of 2009.”
Part of the story could be that holiday shopping is increasingly moving online, and brick-and-mortar retailers are struggling and perhaps hiring less help. That’s an ongoing, long-term structural change to the economy that doesn’t necessarily indicate whether we’re heading into a recession. However, there are a number of signs that softened demand for seasonal workers is related to a broader economic slowdown.
Andrew Challenger, a senior vice president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told us the market for seasonal workers hasn’t seen a miraculous turnaround since their projection in late September. He adds that the broader labor market seems to have only gotten worse since then. In November, his company, which also tracks layoffs, reported an alarming spike in companies announcing layoffs. That includes prominent online retailers like Amazon and delivery companies like UPS. “So we have two signals, and both are not good for the labor market or seasonal hiring,” Challenger says.
Likewise, Indeed Hiring Lab, which leverages data from the job site Indeed to provide insights about the labor market, recently reported similar bad news.
“What we’re seeing right now in seasonal hiring is kind of a microcosm of what we’re seeing in the broader labor market, which is that things are cooling down, things are slowing down,” says Cory Stahle, a senior economist at Indeed Hiring Lab.
Is Santa recession-proof?
The National Bureau of Economic Research, the official body that calls recessions, defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months” (listen to our Planet Money episode,”recession Referees,” for more about this). The lack of official economic statistics for the last few months makes it hard to say whether we’re on our way to a recession – or whether we’re already in one.
But, while reporting this story, we…