Amazon plans to hire 250,000 workers for holiday season. Target says it will add nearly 100,000

NEW YORK -- Amazon said on Tuesday that it will hire 250,000 full- and part-time workers for the holiday season, a 67% jump compared to last year.

Target announced separately it will add nearly 100,000 seasonal roles during the holidays, the same number as it did last year.

The announcement from the two companies follows news from Macy's Inc. on Monday that it will add more than 38,000 full- and part-time seasonal employees at its Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury stores across the country. That's a slight decline from the 41,000 the company planned to onboard in 2022.

Amazon noted more jobs are available because the company has opened over 50 new fulfillment centers, delivery stations and same-day delivery sites in the U.S. this year. The e-commerce giant also wrote in a blog post that it will invest $1.3 billion this year toward pay hikes for warehouse and transportation employees, raising the average pay for those roles from $19 to over $20.50 per hour.

“The holiday season is always a special time at Amazon and we’re excited to hire 250,000 additional people this year to help serve customers across the country,” John Felton, Amazon’s senior vice president of Worldwide Operations, said in the blog post.

To capture the eyes of consumers, retailers like Amazon and Target have been offering holiday deals as early as October in the past few years and are doing the same this year.

Consumer spending has been volatile this year after surging nearly 3% in January. Sales tumbled in February and March before recovering in the spring and summer. The Commerce Department said last week retail sales rose 0.6% in August, driven in part by a big rise in gas prices.

Mastercard SpendingPulse, which tracks spending across all payment forms including cash, said in a report on Tuesday that it expects U.S. retail sales, excluding automotives, to increase by 3.7% from November to late December, a decline from the 7.6% sales growth experienced last year. The accounting firm Deloitte said in its own report last week that it expects holiday sales to jump between 3.5% to 4.6%.

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AP Retail Writer Anne D'Innocenzio contributed to this report.