The spring gardening and home fix-up season mirrors for home improvement stores the December holiday season for most other retailers. To underline the importance of the spring season, Home Depot Inc. (NYSE: HD) said Tuesday that it has begun hiring what eventually will be 80,000 seasonal employees to get the company through the spring selling season. The company also announced that it plans to hire 5,500 associates at its 181 Canadian stores.
Home Depot operates nearly 2,000 stores in the United States, so on average the company plans to hire about 40 permanent part-time and seasonal employees per store. But that is an average, and some states and stores are not slated to gain any new employees, according to a map at the company’s website.
For the past several years, Home Depot and other stores that sell a range of goods for fixing up a house and yard have promoted a sort of mini-Black Friday around the first day of spring in late March. Unlike the “real” Black Friday, discounts have typically been smaller and advertising has been more muted. The stores cannot afford to offer discounts of the same size as the huge promotional sales around Black Friday, so they try to make a small splash rather than a big one.
The best places to snag one of those Home Depot jobs? The company had 232 stores in California, 178 in Texas, 153 in Florida and 100 in New York at the end of the third quarter of 2014, and there are positions being offered at stores in all four of those states.
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