Speaker 1: Tis the season for holiday shopping, deal hunting and seasonal jobs. But this year, things are looking a little different. Retailers are set to add about 520,000 seasonal jobs this year. That's down from last year's 564,000 jobs as online shopping continues to reshape the holiday workforce. In fact, 76 percent of American shoppers plan to do half of their holiday shopping online.

Speaker 2: Over time, we're going to see e-commerce take a greater share of overall sales. It's something that's been steadily growing.

Speaker 1: The retail sector is expected to shrink by 0.2 percent annually over the next decade as e-commerce takes a bigger bite out of in-store sales.

Speaker 2: All retailers are leaning into e-commerce because they have realized that you need to just be where the consumer is and the consumer is in a lot of different places.

Speaker 1: For every e-commerce fulfillment center built, nearly a thousand local jobs are lost each quarter. Still, online shopping is expected to create a 0.6 percent job boost in the next decade.

Speaker 2: What that means is that there's just going to be less jobs for in-store work, but it doesn't mean that there will be less jobs overall. So instead of being able to run a cashier, you're going to need to know how to work a logistics center or work in a distribution center, how to load packages onto a truck or onto pallets and things like that.

Speaker 1: Unsurprisingly, Amazon and UPS are leading the holiday hiring surge with 250,000 and 125,000 respective seasonal job openings this year. The focus isn't on stocking shelves as much as it is fulfilling and delivering online orders to customers. Will e-commerce continue to disrupt retail jobs or is its impact overstated?

Speaker 3: Going back to the very early days of e-commerce, the original list of winners would be Amazon and eBay. Initial losers in the late 90s, early 2000s were Sears, Kmart, Borders, Circuit City, a lot of companies that were disrupted by Amazon.

Speaker 1: Amazon continues to be a disruptor of big box retail and is causing competitors to continue to shift and adapt business needs to compete.

Speaker 2: You see Walmart and Target leaning really heavily into e-commerce specifically, and you also see how their seasonal hiring patterns have changed to include supply chain roles, not just cashiers and people who are in-store.

Speaker 1: Walmart skipped holiday hires this year, opting instead for year-round hiring, while Target added 100,000 seasonal roles.

Speaker 3: Walmart historically has been the king of fulfillment centers, managing their fulfillment centers to get consumers items.

Speaker 1: Walmart is also ramping up automation with five new distribution centers across the country, part of its push to boost e-commerce efficiency.

Speaker 4: There's a big demand for people who work in the warehouses.

Speaker 1: From 2007 to 2023, the number of warehouses soared in the U.S., from 14,000 to 22,000. During the opening weekend of the holiday season, stretching from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, the big winner was e-commerce, bringing in $41.1 billion in online sales. But that meant fewer shoppers in stores. Black Friday foot traffic dipped almost 2 percent.

Speaker 2: Buy Now, Pay Later is a big driver of e-commerce sales because a lot of younger consumers are gravitating towards it because they're concerned about retail credit card debt, especially high interest

Speaker 4: credit card debt. I see e-commerce really continuing, especially as the minimum wage goes up, because as the minimum wage goes up, it's harder for retailers to basically stuff their brick and mortar stores. It's more expensive for them to do that.

Speaker 1: U.S. holiday sales are projected to top $1 trillion this year, up 3.7 percent over 2023. However, this year's growth is lower than the higher gains of years prior.

Speaker 3: The relative growth rate of e-commerce versus just retail, I think you're looking at more of mid-single digit versus low-single digit. And we're no longer in an environment where e-commerce is growing at a 15 percent rate or even a double-digit rate year in and year out.

Speaker 1: And with online sales driving growth, e-commerce is expected to create 450,000 jobs by 2026.

Speaker 2: It's just a part of evolution and becoming more advanced as a society. So our jobs will change. But brick and mortar is still always going to play a very important role in a retailer's overall strategy. It's never going to be online only. It's always going to be a balance of in-store versus online. And the share of in-store and online is going to wax and wane depending upon where we are as a society, how people are shopping, which consumer segment is shopping.

Speaker 4: The wonderful thing about the American labor market is that it's dynamic and it produces opportunities for people who want to work all kinds of jobs.