Amazon plans to hire more than 300,000 workers for the holiday shopping season, an increase of 20 per cent on 2025, making it a stand-out in an otherwise lacklustre market for seasonal work.
The positions include full-time, part-time and seasonal roles, with temporary workers earning an average of $20 an hour, the company said in a blog post on 20 October. The figures were reported by Bloomberg, in a story carried by The Straits Times.
The Seattle company is also encouraging seasonal staff to stay beyond the peak, offering medical benefits to those who remain in January and work at least 30 hours each week.
Amazon is the reference point for seasonal demand in American retail, capturing almost 40 US cents of every dollar spent online, according to EMarketer. Its hiring plans were set out on the company's own corporate blog on 20 October.
The wider picture is thinner. Seasonal retail hiring will likely fall below the 450,000 jobs created in 2025, which would mark the lowest holiday recruitment since 2008, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Seasonal hiring for logistics and warehouse companies will be about flat from 2025, the firm estimated.
Large retailers including Walmart and Target have again refrained from announcing their seasonal recruiting plans, a departure from the pandemic-era hiring sprees.
"Almost every hiring announcement we've seen in the last three years is smaller and more surgical than the pre-pandemic playbook," said Andy Challenger, the firm's chief revenue officer.
Demand, meanwhile, is still growing. American shoppers will spend $275.1 billion online in November and December, up 6.7 per cent from 2025, according to Adobe.
United Parcel Service, which has been reducing package volume from Amazon to concentrate on more profitable business segments, announced earlier in October that it would hire more than 100,000 seasonal workers, roughly in line with previous years.
Pay is also a point of comparison. Amazon's average of $20 an hour for temporary staff, and the offer of medical benefits to those who stay into January on at least 30 hours a week, are the terms against which a shrinking field of seasonal employers is now recruiting.
Set the two headline numbers in the same column and the season acquires a shape. A market of fewer than 450,000 seasonal posts; one employer announcing more than 300,000 of them.
On that arithmetic the weakest holiday jobs market since 2008 is approximately two-thirds Amazon, and the remaining third is where the weakness is being measured.
The relationship is stable under growth, which is the elegant part. Every further warehouse post Amazon adds raises the total and raises Amazon's share of it, so a sufficiently ambitious intake would produce a record-low hiring season composed almost entirely of a record-high employer.
Our analysts accordingly treat the American holiday jobs market as a single company's recruitment plan, published on a corporate blog, plus a rounding error distributed thinly across the rest of retail.
The Department of Unnecessary Research adds the obvious forecast. One more fulfilment centre and the season improves. Two more and the market will have to be measured against something else.