Retail employment worldwide - Statistics & facts

North America and Europe

The preliminary data for February 2022 suggested U.S. retailers employed over 15.7 million people in the country that month. Recording roughly 6.6 trillion U.S. dollars in retail sales in 2021, the United States also represents the largest retail market worldwide. U.S. retail employees worked on average 30.4 hours a week in February 2022. As for their northern neighbors, according to data for 2020, Canadians whose main job was in wholesale and retail trade worked on average 33.5 hours a week. In Germany, which also figures among the world’s leading retail markets, nearly 1.2 million out of its 83 million inhabitants were working full-time in the retail sector in 2020.

Selected retailers

As of 2021, the U.S. multinational Costco employed around 192,000 people just in the United States, and an additional 47,000 employees in Canada. Macy’s, headquartered in New York, USA, had over 75,700 employees on its payroll by the end January 2021, a considerable decrease in comparison to a year earlier. The Swedish H&M employed an average of 107,375 people around the globe in 2021, which similarly represented a significant decrease in comparison to its pre-pandemic personnel numbers. Headquartered in the Netherlands but also founded in Sweden, the major furniture retailer and big-box store known as IKEA employed around 225,000 people worldwide in 2021.

COVID-19 impact on retail employment

Although retail sales have not necessarily decreased, the sector is going through changes, some of which might spell danger for brick-and-mortar operations. Even though warning signs could already be seen before the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the situation further strengthened the e-commerce segment, while also making things even more difficult for physical stores and their employees. Store closures are one of the ways in which jobs are lost, and in 2020, store closures of JCPenney alone impacted around 90,000 jobs in the United States. Across the pond, in the United Kingdom over 105,000 jobs were lost in the sector, and nearly 11,500 store closures were recorded in 2021.

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