Seasonal Hirings Offer A Glimpse Into Companies' Holiday Expectations

For U.S. retailers, it doesn’t get much bigger than holiday shopping season. With November just right around the corner, one way for traders to gauge retailers’ expectations this holiday season is to look at how many seasonal employees they are hiring to help shoulder the seasonal workload.

Here’s a look at how several big companies’ seasonal numbers compared to last year's figures.

• Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN is hiring 120,000 seasonal employees for the holiday season, up from only 100,000 last year.
• J C Penney Company Inc JCP is hiring 40,000 seasonal employees in 2016, up from 30,000 holiday hires last year.
• Kohl’s Corporation KSS is hiring 69,000 seasonal workers this year, in line with the 69,000 it hired last year.
• Macy’s Inc M is hiring 83,000 seasonal associates this year, down from 85,000 in 2015.
• Target Corporation TGT is hiring 70,000 seasonal employees, in line with the 2014 and 2015 seasons.
• United Parcel Service, Inc. UPS is hiring 95,000 short-term employees, up from 93,000 last year.
• Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. WMT hasn’t announced official hiring numbers for 2016, but the company hired 60,000 seasonal holiday workers in 2014 and 2015.

Overall, U.S. companies are expected to hire a total of nearly 740,000 extra seasonal workers this holiday season, in-line with last year’s total.