Hiring Crunch Is Hurting Holiday Spirit of Retailers.

There are less than 70 shopping days left before Christmas, and Los Angeles retailers are not in a merry mood.

In light of the tight labor market, store owners face their stiffest challenge in decades to hire good, part-time sales clerks.

And it will cost them.

With the Los Angeles County unemployment rate at 5.4 percent and most wages better than ever, it has become a behemoth task to find temporary help willing to work for a few dollars above the state's $5.75 minimum wage.

On a national level, the average retail salesperson now earns a little more than $9 an hour, according to the National Retail Federation. That is up about 13 percent from 1996.

While several local retailers interviewed wouldn't divulge what they are willing to pay part-timers, they won't get off cheap. Some temporary workers will be having a happy holiday by making as much as $11 an hour.

To get good part-time help, retailers expect they will have to offer fatter salaries, better work schedules, more flex time and bigger merchandise discounts, a traditional perk for retail sales employees.

Retailers are also having to get more creative in their hiring techniques. Some are offering signing bonuses of up to $300 for any sales associate who brings on a friend or family member to work during the holiday. Others are inserting recruitment notices in department store credit card statements. Some are actively recruiting a broader range of potential hires, such as senior citizens or the disabled. And some store executives are sending recruiters to "mommy and me" classes, hoping to entice stay-at-home moms whose children might be in preschool in the morning and early afternoon.

In Southern California, the Macy's department store chain is planning to place mini-job application forms in early November in three major daily newspapers the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register and San Diego Union-Tribune.

"We've done this kind of recruiting on a localized level when we have a new store opening, but we've never done it on this broad of a scale," said Susan Sittig, Macy's director of recruiting for Southern California.

For awhile, employees at a Zany Brainy toy store in the Los Angeles area were answering their telephone: "This is Zany Brainy and we're hiring."

The past two years have been tough for retailers trying to attract good seasonal help. But this year is exceptionally bad.

"I think it is potentially shaping up to be the worst it has been since the Vietnam War (in the early 1970s)," said John Challenger, president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a Chicago-based outplacement firm with offices in Los Angeles. "Unemployment at 3.9 percent (nationally) is as low as it can get. And that was in September before the retail hiring crunch even begins."

Retailers are facing a double-edge sword. Unemployment is down and the economy is buoyant.

"We started very early in August," said Ari Steiner, district manager for Zany Brainy, which has seven stores in the Los Angeles area. "It has been very much of a focus for every store. We did tag lines on the telephone. There are hiring signs in all of the stores."

Sittig's daunting task is to hire 3,000 part-time employees for Macy's 36 stores in Southern California. That is a 2 percent increase over the number she signed up for last year's holiday season.

"It is certainly a challenging market," Sittig said. "We have tried to really focus on this being a great experience to come to work for us."

This year, Macy's will offer flexible schedules that allow people with full-time jobs elsewhere the opportunity to work at the department store on Fridays after 6 p.m. and on weekends. As in previous years, part-time employees get a 20 percent discount on merchandise.

Retailers have never paid their holiday help much more than minimum wage. And even when they do, it still appears paltry compared to the salaries that many other people are earning.