BILOXI, Miss. -- As retailers toil to get their businesses back in order following the chaos created by Hurricane Katrina back in August, the largest hurdle is finding employees. Katrina caused a forced migration that sent residents of the area to different cities and states. The outcome is some areas showing record population growth and others left as ghost towns.
Tack onto that government support and unemployment benefits and the result is a job opening under every tree, said Jerry Munro, vice president of Munro Petroleum and Terminal Inc., Biloxi, [image-nocss] Miss. [Watch for the June issue of CSP magazine for a complete report from the Gulf Coast.]
Retailers tick off the causes of the employee shortage with frustration in their voices. And while nobody wants to slam a down-on-your-luck area resident who is legitimately struggling to make ends meet for taking funds offered by the federal government, all those interviewed for this story agree the handouts are a major cause of the employment problems they are facing. Unemployment rates in the communities most affected by Katrina are double those in the rest of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
The labor is a very big problem, not just for us, but for the vendors. said Brian Baker, vice president of Slidell Oil, Slidell, La. I know, for example, Coca-Cola has lost a number of drivers, and you may not get exactly what you think you're supposed to get [when a delivery is made]. The lines [in stores] are a little longer because there's not enough cashiers to process the customers as they come through with transactions.
Baker added, I think folks that may have at one point had a job making $20 an hour are able to collect unemployment and do better than they would working in a gas station or a Burger King. And another thing is the people that want to work can go cut sheetrock out of [the damaged] houses and make $20 an hour. So we've lost a lot of labor to that.
To make do, retailers in several channels of trade have increased their pay scale or are offering hurricane bonuses as incentives to lure workers. At Ladas Oil Co. in Chickasaw, Ala., employees who came to work at the company's four Quest Mart stores the first couple of days after the storm received $100 bonuses per day, according to president Steve Ladas.
Burns Oil Co. in Pascagoula, Miss., continues to offer weekly bonuses to store employees, but that wasn't the initial plan, said Michael O'Quin, vice president and general manager of the 18-store chain. The bonuses were originally supposed to last three months, and they're still going on, he said. I think anybody that brought in larger pay is going to have a hard time going back.
To cope, Burns Oil, which does business under the FastTrak banner, is sharing employees among stores and limiting hours of operation. We've got some employees who are working 70 hours a week, O'Quin says.
On the flip side, some markets are benefiting with increased populations and activity. Slidell, La., grew to its predicted 15-year-growth numbers overnight, said Bill Baker, president of Slidell Oil.
Most of that growth is relief workers who moved into the area for the construction jobs. Clark Oil Co.'s store in the small Mississippi town of Bay St. Louis, one of the worst-hit towns along the coast, has seen a tremendous increase in sales, according to director of operations Gary Padilla. Prior to the storm, we were doing $8,000 a week inside. We're doing in the $60,000 range now, he says. We were the first to be open [after the storm]. It's eight months later, and there's still a huge sales volume.
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