Retail Is Hiring Again, One Part-Time Shift at a Time

Canadian retail added nearly 38,000 jobs over two months, but almost all of it is street-level and part-time, and the sector is still down year over year. The rebound is real. So is its unevenness.

Retail has quietly become one of the brighter spots in the Canadian labour market, and the July jobs report confirmed it: wholesale and retail trade added 21,100 positions, on top of 16,400 in June, for a combined 37,500 over two months. After a first half shadowed by tariff uncertainty and cautious consumers, stores are hiring again. But the shape of that hiring, and what it says about the kind of work being created, deserves a closer look than the headline allows.

Start with the caveat that keeps the rebound honest. Even after two strong months, retail and wholesale employment remains about 50,100 positions below where it stood in July 2025, a year-over-year decline of 1.7 percent. The sector is climbing out of a hole, not scaling new heights. This is recovery, and recovery is worth having, but it is recovery from a genuinely weak stretch that the industry has not yet fully undone.

The character of the work

The more important detail for anyone in staffing is not how many retail jobs are being created but what kind. The answer, in this rebound, is overwhelmingly part-time and at store level. "The demand is almost entirely street level, with an emphasis in hiring multiple part-time workers," said Suzanne Sears of Best Retail Careers International, whose account of the market frames the Retail Insider report. This is not a wave of permanent, full-time, career-track hiring. It is a wave of shifts.

That has clear implications for the staffing model. Part-time, store-level demand is the natural territory of high-volume, fast-turnover placement, and close to a quarter of employed returning students spend the summer working in retail, which tells you how seasonal and how churn-heavy this segment is. The demand is real and plentiful, but it is demand for flexibility and speed rather than for the higher-margin permanent placements that anchor other parts of the staffing business.

Where the market is genuinely straining is at the specialized and senior end. Sears pointed to real difficulty finding qualified staff in cosmetics and beauty and across luxury retail, from watches and jewellery to luxury menswear, and to a harder structural problem above the shop floor: "It is nearly impossible to attract high-level talent with last year's wage budgets." Retail wages have moved, with average weekly earnings reaching $798 in May, up 8 percent year over year, but that figure remains far below the economy-wide average of $1,338, and the gap is part of why senior retail talent is hard to attract and hold.

The Hudson's Bay overhang and the uneven map

Two other forces are shaping this market in ways a staffing firm should factor in. The first is the displacement left by Hudson's Bay store closures, which pushed thousands of experienced retail workers into the market who have not readily matched with new positions. That is a pool of available, experienced talent that a well-connected agency is positioned to redeploy, precisely the kind of matching problem staffing exists to solve.

The second is geography. Retail and wholesale employment in rural and small-town Canada grew by 13,600 jobs, or 3.7 percent year over year through June, as chains expand into historically underserved communities. The rebound, in other words, is not evenly distributed across the map, and the growth at the edges may offer less contested ground than the saturated urban centers.