New York City’s retail job market is shrinking, even as more retail jobs are being created nationwide and as the city’s overall economy has almost entirely recovered from the pandemic.
The city’s retail industry lost 37,800 jobs — an 11% decline — from February 2020 to 2023, according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future, or CUF, a local policy think tank. Nationwide, retail jobs rose by 0.7%.
The stark losses are contributing to the widening gap in unemployment rates between Black and white New Yorkers.
The analysis found that the city’s retail industry lost 37,800 jobs—an 11% decline—from February 2020 to 2023. Nationwide, retail jobs rose by 0.7%.
Retail even lags behind the city’s other “face-to-face” industries that were hit hard by the pandemic, like food service and hotels. The city’s restaurant jobs shrunk by 5.7%, half as much as the city’s retail jobs.
The city lost 1,000 retail chain store locations in 2020, and though more have opened in recent years, the total number still hasn’t reached pre-pandemic levels, the CUF found. Duane Reade, for example, shuttered 64 stores in the city in 2020, and another 22 last year.
Jonathan Bowles, the CUF’s executive director and the report’s co-author, said the trend is likely to continue because of the e-commerce boom and automation.
“It worries me that this important sector may not get back to the level that it was prior to the pandemic,” Bowles said.
The contraction threatens an important source of jobs for the industry’s predominantly non-white workforce. The report called upon elected officials in the city and state to help these workers find other well-paying jobs in the local economy.
“These jobs are important for many New Yorkers that are not able to access the higher-wage jobs that are actually growing right now in the city’s economy,” Bowles said.
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