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With winter fast approaching, and the holiday season along with it, so too comes seasonal hiring. Much of this hiring will come within the Metro Area’s third largest-employing industry sector: Retail Trade. As of the second quarter of 2023, this industry was comprised of nearly 8,200 establishments supplying over 154,400 jobs in the region. And these jobs are dispersed among a variety of areas, from department stores and supercenters, to grocery and liquor stores, to furniture and electronics retailers, to clothing stores, jewelry retailers, sporting goods stores and more.
With such a variety of subsectors, the Retail Trade industry has a wide variety of entry points and career pathways. Those occupations with the highest concentrations of employment in this sector include Retail Salespersons; Cashiers; Stockers and Order Fillers; First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers; Customer Service Representatives; Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics; Pharmacy Technicians; Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers; Food Preparation Workers; Fast Food and Counter Workers; Light Truck or Delivery Services Drivers; and Parts Salespersons.
Many of these Retail Trade occupations are high employing. Retail Salespersons, for example, is the Metro Area’s second largest-employing occupation. This is out of more than 800 specific occupations. Customer Service Representatives is the region’s third largest-employing occupation. Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers; Fast Food and Counter Workers; and Cashiers are also in the region’s top ten largest-employing occupations. With such high employment in the Metro Area, many of these occupations have equally large numbers of job vacancies. In fact, those top ten occupations with the highest concentration of jobs in Retail Trade account for one-sixth of the Metro Area’s total job vacancies. These are clearly jobs that are in high demand (Table 1).
| Table 1. Dakota County Industry Statistics, Q2 2023 | |||||
| Industry | Number of Jobs | Share of Total Jobs | Number of Firms | Total Quarterly Payroll | Avg. Annual Wage |
| Total, All Industries | 188,914 | 100.0% | 11,597 | $3,132,189,145 | $66,300 |
| Health Care and Social Assistance | 23,808 | 12.6% | 1,843 | $335,830,518 | $56,420 |
| Retail Trade | 23,580 | 12.5% | 1,125 | $223,107,059 | $37,804 |
| Manufacturing | 19,718 | 10.4% | 463 | $390,996,454 | $79,300 |
| Accommodation and Food Services | 15,484 | 8.2% | 764 | $98,174,928 | $25,324 |
| Transportation and Warehousing | 14,829 | 7.8% | 455 | $258,790,430 | $69,784 |
| Educational Services | 14,687 | 7.8% | 309 | $225,663,839 | $61,412 |
| Construction | 10,893 | 5.8% | 1,064 | $241,356,020 | $88,608 |
| Finance and Insurance | 9,716 | 5.1% | 620 | $266,068,682 | $109,512 |
| Wholesale Trade | 8,951 | 4.7% | 714 | $200,738,454 | $89,700 |
| Administrative and Support Services | 8,427 | 4.5% | 591 | $106,230,871 | $50,388 |
| Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services | 7,950 | 4.2% | 1,273 | $186,045,975 | $93,600 |
| Other Services | 7,058 | 3.7% | 1,182 | $81,872,797 | $46,384 |
| Public Administration | 5,983 | 3.2% | 78 | $100,762,260 | $67,340 |
| Information | 5,272 | 2.8% | 215 | $122,833,369 | $93,184 |
| Management of Companies | 4,441 | 2.4% | 90 | $130,688,724 | $117,676 |
| Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation | 3,826 | 2.0% | 211 | $88,052,872 | $92,040 |
| Real Estate and Rental and Leasing | 2,287 | 1.2% | 519 | $36,680,057 | $64,116 |
| Agriculture | 1,352 | 0.7% | 59 | $13,512,398 | $39,936 |
| Utilities | 528 | 0.3% | 13 | $21,445,026 | $162,448 |
| Mining | 120 | 0.1% | 9 | $3,338,412 | $111,280 |
| Source: DEED Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) | |||||
With the nature of being such large-employing occupations, DEED’s Employment Outlook data reveals that many retail occupations will have a very large number of projected openings through 2030. As Table 1 reveals, this is mainly due to replacement openings. For example, while total employment for Retail Salespersons is anticipated to decline by 3.0% between 2020 and 2030 in the Metro Area, it is still projected to have over 25,200 projected openings. This is solely due to replacement openings.
To discover more about Retail Trade in the Twin Cities Metro Area, Contact Tim O’Neill, Labor Market Analyst, at timothy.oneill@state.mn.us.
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