From The Editor

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By Matt Pillar, editor in chief

Late last week, a report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas suggested that the retail industry made plans to slash more than 12,000 jobs in January. Planned retail job cuts lead all industries with the largest share of the 53,486 announced cuts.

The numbers sound like a drop in the bucket in relation to recent unemployment and jobs reports, but the January total was 28% higher than the 41,785 job cuts announced in December and 39% higher than in January 2011, when employers announced 38,519 planned cuts. The retail total was the largest since January 2010, when there were 16,737 announced layoffs.

Unfortunately these aren't seasonal positions, which aren't reported or announced in retailers' layoff plans. Rather, the cuts are a direct result of restructuring, store closings, and cost cutting.

At the same time, the number of people seeking unemployment benefits in general keeps falling. Unemployment applications fell 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 367,000 last week, and the four-week average dropped for the third straight week to 375,750.

An AP survey of economists suggests we'll see an average gain of 160,000 new jobs per month in 2012, up from an average of about 135,000 last year. That improvement is measurable, but Ken Perkins says we must keep it in perspective. In a MarketWatch Podcast last week, Perkins, a noted retail financial analyst and founder of Retail Metrics, said we'll need to consistently hit the 200,000 new jobs per month mark before consumerism really returns. That's happened once (December 2011) in the past six months.

At the NRF Big Show in NY last month, jobs and joblessness were front-and-center issues. The event was a showcase for the Federation's recently stepped-up lobbying effort on the jobs front, an initiative built around a PricewaterhouseCoopers/NRF-commissioned study that says retailers provided close to 42 million jobs in 2009 (nearly one in four US jobs) while adding nearly $2.5 trillion to the nation's gross domestic product. Just how committed is the NRF to pushing its cause in Washington? Under new chief executive Matt Shay, the organization has more than doubled its lobbying budget with plans to spend $10 million on the campaign this year.

Go to www.retailmeansjobs.com/Agenda for details on the NRF's "Retail Means Jobs" campaign.