Radial in the market for seasonal staff
Radial, the $1.3 billion (yearly net sales), King of Prussia-based online-retail and logistics firm, says it's scrambling to find 20,000 temporary workers to staff its warehouses in Kentucky and other states, as part of the industry's Christmas-season buildup.
Radial, the $1.3 billion (yearly net sales), King of Prussia-based online-retail and logistics firm, says it's scrambling to find 20,000 temporary workers to staff its warehouses in Kentucky and other states, as part of the industry's Christmas-season buildup.
That's a one-third boost over last year's holiday hiring, said Stefan Weitz, Radial's chief product and strategy officer. And it's getting tougher to find people: "We're seeing low unemployment causing us challenges, and pressure from competition," including Amazon.com. "We are using a number of labor agencies" to locate workers, he said.
"Hundreds of thousands of people are getting hired for this seasonal work" at retail warehouses, says Marc Wulfraat, a Montreal-based logistics consultant. Amazon, which is more than 25 times Radial's size, says it hired 100,000 Christmas season workers last year, UPS added 90,000, FedEx 55,000.
The source of future warehouse and delivery workers "is the biggest issue that no one's talking about," Wulfraat added. "We take it for granted you can hire someone at $11 an hour. But with the baby boomers retiring, that's going away."
Radial's fall hiring targets include 6,900 at four sites in Kentucky; 3,200 workers at two warehouses in Florida; 3,000 in Memphis; 1,600 in Martinsville, Va.; 1,000 in Groveport, Ohio; and more at smaller locations in California, Colorado, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The company also has centers in Canada, England, Germany, India, and Spain.
Radial's Weitz also expects "a little bump" at the company's First Avenue headquarters in King of Prussia, which employs 650. Since the company was sold to private-equity investors and combined with Georgia-based Innotrac last year, Radial has built a national management team including Weitz, a Microsoft veteran, and others, including chief revenue officer Steven Birdsall (ex-Hearst Business Media) and Sean McCartney (Chico's).
While Amazon is pacing the industry with its expansion into same-day local delivery, and its local competition and sometimes partnership with UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Postal Service, there is plenty of room for growth, with online and mobile shopping still accounting for less than 10 percent of U.S. retail, Weitz told me.
"There aren't enough warehouses, there aren't enough workers, there aren't enough planes, there aren't enough pilots," he told me. "Every extra 35,000 boxes a day is another $50 million plane. That doesn't scale. So the interesting story is looking at what infrastructure change will have to be made to continue this e-commerce growth."
To ease the online- and mobile-sales workload, Radial is helping clients such as GameStop and Kate Spade build shipping systems. "If GameStop has 4,000 outlets doing ship-from-store, instead of just two warehouses, they can ground-ship, say via UPS, and get it there in a day."
There will, he said, be more local warehouses, more stores with delivery and collection services.
Weitz said this also means a golden age for logistics startups. He's negotiating with extra-local pickup-dropoff services like Curbside, local delivery couriers like Postmate, even robot developers like Starship Technologies.
If that sounds like expensive service, Weitz says investors are betting better and faster data and logistics services will make mass delivery more efficient.
Radial operates 26 distribution centers and six call centers in the U.S., employing 7,000 full-time workers, plus the larger seasonal staff.
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