Amazon and Target give Americans an early Christmas gift+

The economic signals of the past few years have been very mixed. 

Retailers like Walmart, Target, Costco  (COST) - Get Free Report and Amazon have openly talked about rising costs and having to charge higher prices to customers.

Americans also have faced higher gasoline prices, which in turn forced up the price of everything from groceries to airfares. 

Add in higher housing costs -- fewer homes for sale prompting higher selling prices plus higher interest rates making mortgages a lot more expensive -- and you get consumer sentiment dragging badly.  

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Prices, however, are not the only thing that dictates whether the economy is healthy, The state of the labor market also matters, and the unemployment rate sits at 3.8%, relatively low by historic standards. That's good not just for job seekers but also for people who have jobs.

If companies can't find needed workers, wages go up. We've seen that phenomenon push major retailers, including Target and Walmart,  (WMT) - Get Free Report to significantly hike their entry-level hourly wages. 

This has also happened at some fast-food chains, where minimum wage was once common and now a $15 entry-level hourly rate has become much more prevalent.

Currently, two jobs are available for every unemployed U.S. worker, according to U.S. Labor Department data. That gives people whose jobs pay lower wages more leverage to make a move and get paid more.

Now, two employers that pay at least $15 an hour, Target and Amazon (AMZN) - Get Free Report, have shared plans to add hundreds of thousands of jobs.     

Target and Amazon have huge hiring plans

For many people, seasonal opportunities can be a foot in the door. 

Many of these jobs — traditionally more than half — convert into permanent opportunities. No company promises this transition, but the reality is that if you get hired for a seasonal job and work hard, you stand a good chance of being hired or put on a list to be brought back when positions open up.

In addition. flexible part-time seasonal jobs enable some people to change jobs. A worker might take night or weekend hours at an employer that pays a higher rate than their main job and ultimately make the switch.  

Both Target  (TGT) - Get Free Report and Amazon have plans to massively increase their workforces for the holiday season. Target plans to add about 100,000 seasonal workers while Amazon is trying to hire more than 250,000. 

Amazon tooted its horn in a news release about its hiring plans.

Amazon is hiring 250,000 people in full-time, part-time, and seasonal fulfillment center and transportation roles in hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. Amazon is the country’s leading job creator—adding more than 800,000 jobs in the last five years—and is now investing $1.3 billion this year toward pay increases for customer fulfillment and transportation employees, bringing the average pay for those roles to over $20.50 per hour (a more than 50% increase over five years), with some locations offering as much as $28 per hour.

Those numbers are good not just for Amazon workers — higher wages at an employer large enough to fill hundreds of thousands of open positions pushes wages higher at rival retailers. 

With only about 6.4 million unemployed Americans, the competition for workers is already fierce, and the hiring sprees at Amazon and Target should force entry-level wages higher and perhaps prompt other retailers to give raises to retain their employees.

Target has a unique flexible work program

Target has a specific program that helps existing workers optimize their schedules to get the shifts and the amount of hours they want. After that, the company turns to its On Demand team to fill available hours.

"Over the past few years, Target has successfully established an On Demand team — a flexible workforce that includes nearly 45,000 team members — who have the option to pick up shifts on an as-desired basis to fit their schedule," the company said in a news release.

These are workers who may have left the company but have the ability to pick up shifts as their schedules allow. Target plans to use its seasonal workforce to supplement the needs of its stores after maxing out its current workforce. 

"While we don’t currently offer On Demand positions in our supply-chain facilities or for seasonal hires, those team members will have the opportunity to discuss transitioning to an On Demand role following the holiday season," the retailer said.

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