Kronos® Incorporated announced the October release of the Kronos Retail Labor Index™, a family of metrics and indices that analyze the relationship between the demand and supply sides of the labor market within the U.S. retail sector, and provide a distinct and early indicator of the overall state of the economy. The October report includes data for September 2010.

News Facts

- The Kronos Retail Labor Index: (This metric is defined as the percentage of job applications that result in a hiring, normalized within a scale of 0 to 100. A level of 3.00 percent means that for every 100 applications received, three hirings occurred). The Kronos Retail Labor Index increased to 3.6 this month.

- Retail Hiring Level: The retailers representing 27,034 distributed locations across the U.S. that make up the Kronos data sample recorded 37,900 hirings (on a seasonally adjusted basis) in September 2010, a decrease of 4.4 percent from the August 2010 seasonally adjusted figure of 39,640 hirings, as well as a decrease of 6.4 percent from the 40,477 hirings that occurred in September 2009.

- Retail Applications Level: The supply of applications decreased to a greater degree than did the hirings, by 8.7 percent, to a seasonally adjusted level of 1,059,617 in September. The September figure represented a significant 30.4 percent decrease from the 1,522,309 applications processed in September 2009.

- Retail Employee Retention Rate: Employee retention decreased slightly in September 2010 as compared with September 2009; the percentage of employees remaining on the job 60 days or more was 83.9 percent, a decrease of 1.8 percent over August 2010 and 2.3 percent over September 2009.

Supporting Quotes

- Dr. Robert Yerex, chief economist, Kronos

“The number of hirings that occurred in September decreased 4.4 percent over the previous month and 6.4 percent over the same month last year. Similar to the previous two months, September’s decrease in hiring was smaller than the decrease in applications received, but showed a significant decrease, by 30.4 percent, compared with the applications processed in September 2009.”

“Despite these and many other apparently bleak economic indicators, retailers have steadily increased their after tax profitability on a cents per dollar of sales base over each of the past three quarters to three cents on a dollar of sales. I believe it is likely that the economy is approaching a “new normal” equilibrium point where total consumer spending remains 10-15 percent below its historic peak, with retailers stabilizing their workforces at levels 20 percent below what they were at the time of this peak.”