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November 15, 2008
NAPLES - Season, the holiday kind and the tourism kind, typically ushers in part-time work along with good cheer.
But this year, job-seekers’ spirits may be dashed as retailers and restaurants trim back seasonal hiring.
“We will be reducing our hiring decisions at a rate about equal to where store sales are down,” said Bob Ricketts, manager of J.C. Penney at the Coastland Center mall in Naples.
He declined to state a figure, but J.C. Penney Co. reported that comparable-store sales for October plunged 11.8 percent.
The department store will be hiring for season in the next week or two and if you applied there, your chances for landing one of the commission-based sales positions are slim.
Ricketts said the store has seen a 20 percent increase in the number of applicants while openings at the struggling store are shrinking.
And the face of the applicant pool has changed.
“We’ve always had the college students come in,” he said. “But we’re also seeing an increase in applications from people in the real estate business and the construction industry.”
This is the second year the department store reduced hiring.
“We’re all waiting for this to bottom out, for business to get better,” Ricketts said.
And it’s not just retailers who are being careful not to over-hire.
Naples’ bustling restaurant industry is sensing tough times.
“There was some adjusting,” said Stuart Dickson, the general manager of Tommy Bahamas Tropical Cafe on Third Street South. “We didn’t want to hire too many too quickly.”
The restaurant held back by about 20 percent, he said, and expects to see business decline by about 10 percent.
That’s been the pace of the off-season business so far, he said, and the first time in 10 years that Dickson has seen any declines.
He is also seeing a few more uncharacteristic applicants looking for work.
“A lot of people who have been secretaries, leaders of business, we’ve got a commodities broker wanting to work for us,” he said. “They’re taking everything they can get their hands on. The problem is they don’t have the experience we need.”
The restaurant is pushing workers harder, cutting shifts quicker and staggering schedules.
That type of pressure comes with a price.
Dickson recently heard a complaint from a client who said: “It just wasn’t worth what we got.”
Customers are growing more critical of the service they are getting for their money.
“When they’re lower on money,” Dickson said, “they’re going to be strained. They’re going to question where are they going to spend it.”
As more people are turning to retail and restaurants for supplemental income, some are turning to those industries for any income at all.
“Somebody may have been a mortgage lender at a bank, they have been laid off, their income is usually $50,000,” explained C.J. Hueston, president and chief executive officer of Corporate Dimensions, a high-level job placement firm based in Naples.
“But they can’t find work as a mortgage lender so what they have done is taken a job at Nordstrom in retail ... in order to keep the bills paid, keep the money coming in.”
Collier County’s September unemployment rate, the latest figure available, was 8.4 percent, up from 5.9 percent a year ago.
In Lee County, the unemployment rate was 9.2 percent compared with 5.7 percent a year ago.
Tom Messina, owner of Total Concept, a Fort Myers-based design company that operates an employment Web site for Southwest Florida, has seen traffic double in the past four months.
Previously, www.southwestfloridaemployment.com saw about 400 unique viewers per day, he said. During the past couple of months, about 800 people each day were looking for work there.
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