Kronos Incorporated announced the September release of the Kronos Retail Labor Index™, a family of metrics and indices that characterize the current state of the demand and supply sides of the labor market within the U.S. retail sector. The September report includes data for August 2011. The analysis and write-up is prepared by Macroeconomic Advisers LLC, and is available on the Kronos Retail Labor Index website.

News Facts

- The Kronos Retail Labor Index: (This index is defined as the ratio of hires to applicants within a given month, expressed as a percentage. A level of 3.0 percent means that for every 100 applications received, three hires occurred). The Kronos Retail Labor Index was unchanged at 3.5 percent in August 2011, as both hires and applications increased slightly, all on a seasonally adjusted basis.

- Retail Hiring Level: The retailers representing 13,755 distributed locations across the U.S. that make up the Kronos® data sample recorded 32,819 hires (seasonally adjusted) in August 2011, up 1.4 percent from a revised 32,377 hires in July 2011.

- Retail Applications Level: The number of applications received by retailers in the Kronos sample rose 2.5 percent in August 2011, to 948,076, from a revised 925,378 in July 2011, all on a seasonally adjusted basis.

- Retail 60-Day Retention Rate: The 60-day retention rate, measured as the number of hires who remain employed for at least the first 60 days divided by the total number of hires made in that month, rose to 85 percent (seasonally adjusted) in April from 84.6 percent in March (Note: There is a four-month lag on this indicator as two months are required to measure whether a hire remained employed for 60 days and Kronos customers have two months to return data on separations.)

Supporting Quotes

- Chris Varvares, senior managing director and co-founder, Macroeconomic Advisers
“Despite the 1.4 percent rise in August, it remains the case that retail hiring has really only begun to recover since the end of the recession, with hiring by firms included in the Kronos sample just 8.5 percent above the first quarter of 2009. Nevertheless, this is considerably stronger than retail hiring as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is up just 2.7 percent since early 2009. A strong report on retail sales for July, as well as solid chain-store sales reported for August, points to some strengthening in the retail industry of late and potentially a further pick-up in retail hiring ahead.”