Hiring and preparation on the rise ahead of holiday season in Pine Belt

PINE BELT, Miss. (WDAM) - We’re still 12 weeks away from Christmas Day, but preparation is starting now. Small businesses in the Pine Belt, as well as the big-name box stores, are increasing staff to tackle the holiday rush.

Around this time of year, you typically see boxes and boxes piled up inside businesses. Usually, it’s just an increase in shipment to restock shelves ahead of the holiday season.

“We actually start ordering our merchandise and inventory for Christmas back in January as soon as the holiday season ends the year before,” said Ashlyn Lawler, sales manager at Rhinestone Ranch in Petal.

Lawler said their motto is the sooner, the better. She added that those early shipments usually make it to the store by June, but they’re constantly tracking inventory not to fall behind.

“We kind of have to go through and see what comes in because a lot of times, even if we order it in January, it may be backorder, out of stock,” said Lawler. “So, we still won’t necessarily get it. So we have to go, ‘Ok, plan B. This is what we’re going to order. We need to reach out to another company; what do they have in stock that they can ship now?’”

Small businesses aren’t the only ones ramping up for the holidays. Big stores, like Target, plan to hire 100,000 seasonal team members. Walmart looks to bring in 40,000, and of course, we can’t forget about our mail carriers, like the United States Postal Service and UPS, also adding to their teams.

The mail industry can get slammed during the holidays - from an increase in packages to making sure they’re delivered on time.

Here’s the USPS holiday prep rundown.

• 100,000 part-time workers have been promoted to full-time since January 2021; of that, 41,000 this year as of January 2022
• 28,000 will be hired for seasonal work, plus 1,000 truck drivers
• And expanding its processing capacity to process roughly 60 million packages a day, which is a 7 million jump from last year

“So even to get orders in and to get orders out, we really have to rely on them,” said Lawler. “Especially when it gets down to crunch time like a week before. So it helps when they have more workers. It allows us to get our inventory faster and get our orders shipped out faster.”

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