Retail and hospitality can’t find people anymore. The problem isn’t wages: it’s that management is still stuck in the nineties.
Every morning, a hotel manager in London opens his inbox and counts the applications received for a receptionist position: zero. The HR director of a twenty-store retail chain in Milan has kept a sales associate posting open for three months: seventeen applications, twelve didn’t show up at the interview. The country manager of a top luxury brand has kept the position of a Store Director open for the last eight months, without success.
This is not a labour shortage in the classical sense. It is something deeper: a refusal.
The paradox: Essential sectors, unwanted jobs
Retail and hospitality are everywhere. They give shape to the daily economy, create brand experience, build customer relationships. Without them, cities and tourism grind to a halt. Yet they have become the sectors where attracting and retaining people has grown structurally impossible. The cost of continuous recruitment is quietly but systematically eroding margins. The industry complains about candidate scarcity, but rarely asks itself why those candidates chose to go elsewhere.
Nineties management, 2026 labour market
The blunt answer is that these sectors have continued to manage people as if it were still the nineties, while the labour market around them has changed radically. This is not nostalgia: it is an operational diagnosis.
- Unpredictable shifts, often communicated with only a few days’ notice
- Weekends and holidays treated as a given, with no real compensation in terms of quality of life
- Opaque or nonexistent career paths: after three years you’re still a sales associate
- Poor training, ( a lot of self learning online training!) and even poorer professional recognition
- No opinions allowed in how one’s own time is organised
- Outdated workplace technology that increases fatigue without creating value
It’s not (just) all about the money
Talking about the 90’s, Swedish singer Meja had a hit that said: “It’s all about the money”. It would be convenient to reduce everything to a pay question. But anyone who has worked in HR in these sectors knows it is not that simple. When people leave, the primary reason is almost never salary (may be at an early stage of the career) it is the lack of predictability, respect for personal time, and any sense of a future.
Younger generations ( Gen Z in particular) have a fundamentally different relationship with work. It is not laziness; it is a deliberate change of priorities. If a job does not allow you to build a life outside of it, that job is not acceptable. Full stop.
The most uncomfortable comparison: a remote worker at the same income level decides autonomously when to work, where to be, how to organise their week. A shop assistant does not. Yet that shop assistant interacts with hundreds of people a day, manages complex situations in real time, and is the face of the brand. We were running a search for a logistic manager a few weeks ago and more than half of the potential candidates gave up as soon as they heard that the job was fully in presence. They wouldn’t trade a few thousand Euro more for two days per week of remote working.
The question companies avoid asking: why should that person accept conditions a knowledge worker would refuse without a second thought?
Step 5: Rules. Many of them. Non-negotiable.
The courtesy car came with a briefing. No eating. No drinking. A list of prohibitions delivered in the tone of someone reading from a disciplinary code.
None of this is unreasonable in principle. Courtesy cars get abused. Rules exist for a reason. But there is a way to communicate expectations that feels like care for a shared asset and a way that feels like you’re already being held in suspicion. This was the latter.
A single sentence, delivered with a half-smile, would have changed everything: “Just the usual, try to keep it as you find it and you’re all good.” Or another easy way would have been to ask or confirm that the way to drive that car would have been similar or different to the one I own. Instead: the list. Delivered straight as a whisky. No context, no warmth.
What companies can do, right now
This is not utopia. These are operational choices that some organisations are already making, with measurable results.
01 Give time back its predictability
Schedules communicated 3–4 weeks in advance are not a luxury: they are the minimum condition for having a life. Some companies have invested in scheduling systems that honour employee preferences. The outcome: lower turnover, higher productivity.
02 Rethink the weekend
A Store Director I was coaching once described a policy established by his Retail Director: every Client Advisor had to be present in store, every weekend, no exceptions. The store was a hundred square metres. The team spent their Saturdays and Sundays not serving clients: they were avoiding each other feet, frustrated at being there at all. Two problems at once: people who didn’t want to work the weekend, and no comfortable place to perform.
This is what happens when weekend scheduling is driven by a rule rather than by a plan.
The solution is not eliminating weekend work, structurally impossible in retail and hospitality. It is building a fair rotation system that guarantees everyone a minimum number of free weekends per month, communicated in advance and non-negotiable. Not a favour. A structure. Companies that put this in place become immediately more attractive, not because they work less, but because people can finally plan their lives.
03 Build real career path and professionalize the role
“You could become a floor supervisor in a few years” is not a career: it is an illusion. What is needed are defined path, clear milestones, credentials recognised outside the company, and growth steps that make both economic and professional sense. Skill certification: visual merchandising, customer experience, inventory management, can be a powerful tool.
An expert barista knows a bit of chemistry, physics, customer relations, and how to manage service-pressure anxiety. A luxury sales associate understands consumer psychology, non-verbal communication, and product storytelling. These are not “little jobs”: they are professions. Treating them as true professions, in language, titles, and training, makes a real difference to how the role is perceived.
04 Give people a voice
Frontline workers know things office management does not. Creating structured mechanisms to gather their input (not just on climate or employee engagement, but on operations, customers, and processes) is both an act of respect and a source of competitive advantage. Bottom-up feedback is not a nice to have, it is operational intelligence.
05 Use technology to support, not surveil and take more time
Too many technology deployments in retail and hospitality are surveillance systems sold as operational support. Technology should eliminate the worst parts of the job ( manual stocktaking, paper-based shift management, slow manual counting )in order to leave the most human and meaningful parts intact.
One of the most insidious forms of time theft in these sectors is the work WhatsApp group. Shift over. Day off. Doesn’t matter. The messages keep coming, and the pressure to read them, to stay informed, to be seen as available, rarely stops at the end of the day. This is not communication; it is a slow erosion of the boundary between work and life. Several European countries have moved toward codifying a legal right to disconnect. Companies that enforce it voluntarily (before the law requires it) send a signal that personal time is real, not negotiable.
Who is already doing it?
EssilorLuxottica signed an agreement with trade unions in September 2025 introducing a four-day working week across its Italian operations: same salary, twenty additional rest days per year. One of the largest eyewear groups in the world, with a manufacturing and retail footprint that makes the move impossible to dismiss as a boutique experiment.
Wickes, the UK home improvement retailer, ran a six-month trial of the four-day week across 230 stores. 96.5% of participating store managers reported being satisfied or very satisfied with the new arrangement. Performance indicators showed no negative impact. The model held under real operational conditions, at scale.
Marks & Spencer piloted compressed scheduling for retail managers: 75% reported a measurable positive impact on their family life. Not a side effect.
Marriott International has invested consistently in structured learning programmes for frontline workers: modular, built around the actual time constraints of roles based on shifts. The company has ranked among Fortune and Great Place to Work’s top 10 employers in the US for multiple consecutive years. Recognition that comes with thoughtful investment in people, not with luck.
The common thread across all of them: these organisations stopped treating working conditions as a cost to be minimised and started treating them as an investment in service quality. Workers who feel respected treat customers better. The bill gets paid either way: the question is whether you choose where it goes.
The staffing problem in retail and hospitality is not an HR problem. It is a strategic one.
It touches product quality, customer satisfaction, and the sustainability of the business model. Continuing to manage people with 90’s logic in a 2026 market is not just ethically wrong: it is a business mistake.
Companies that understand this before their competitors will have a real and measurable advantage. Those waiting for “the market to normalise” will wait a long time, because the market is not normalising. It is changing. And it is not coming back.
“It is not that nobody wants to work anymore. It is that nobody wants to work like this.”
