Behind The Store Front

Prepared for the Retail Council of Canada in partnership with Industry Canada By Jacobson Consulting Inc.

Work Force
Occupations in Retail

There is a tendency to characterize retail as being an industry focussed on low-paying sales and cashiers jobs. In fact, retail, because of its many locations, employs a much bigger share of managers than other sectors. It is also true that some of the retail sub-sectors employ an above-average proportion of finance and finance and administration professionals relative to the economy as a whole.

The next chart (Figure 53), based on the census, shows the proportion of these broad occupational groups in the all industry labour force as well as the individual retail sectors.


  • Figure 53 Labour Force Occupational Characteristics

    • The auto retailing and non-store sectors employ an above-average share of business, finance and administration professionals. The Cashiers occupational group, a subset of the broader sales and service group is naturally very significant in the food and beverages as well as general merchandise sectors which emphasize self-service modes of shopping. In occupational terms, the broad structure of the retail sector is not dissimilar to the manufacturing sector as a whole. The next chart (Figure 54) disaggregates the sector labour force into three broad occupational groupings:

    • Management, finance and technical,
    • Sales and service, trades and processing, and
    • Other.
    The analysis is done using the 1980 SIC and the corresponding occupational classification to facilitate comparison across the three most recent Census observations. The logic for the grouping is obvious. Sales and service are the production workers of the service sector.


  • Figure 54 Occupational Comparison — Retail and Manufacturing

    • The figure indicates a broad similarity between retail and manufacturing in terms of the relative emphasis on managerial, financial and technical personnel. There has been a modest decline in the share in retail possibly associated with consolidations and format changes in the sector.

    2007, Retail Council of Canada — The Voice of Retail