NEW YORK — UPS will hire up to 95,000. Kohl’s plans to take on 67,000 and FedEx 50,000. Walmart will add 60,000.
One after the other, a flurry of major US retail and transportation companies announced sharp increases this week in the number of temporary workers they plan to hire for the holiday season. Collectively, such hiring could reach its highest point this year for stores since 1999, when the economy was roaring and the Great Recession was still eight years away.
Credit the combination of a strengthening economy and optimism about consumer spending. Stores have determined that they will need more temporary help for the holiday season, which accounts for 20 percent of the retail industry’s annual sales.
Their stepped-up hiring plans reflect another reality, too: More retailers have come to recognize the need to improve their customer service in the age of online king Amazon. Many shoppers now jump back and forth between their mobile devices and physical stores and expect the same easy shopping experience at both.
Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc., a global outplacement consultancy, predicts retailers will add more than 800,000 seasonal workers for the October-through-December period.
Such hiring last topped that figure in 1999, when stores added 849,500 temporary workers. It credits brightening confidence among consumers.
‘‘The last two years saw holiday hiring return to prerecession levels,’’ said John Challenger, chief executive of the Chicago-based outplacement firm. ‘‘This year, we could see hiring return to levels not seen since the height of the dot.com boom. . . . There are more people who are surer about their spending.’’
The outlook for job and income growth have both improved, says Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group.
The unemployment rate has tumbled to 6.1 percent. A year ago, it was 7.2 percent. Three years ago, it was 9 percent.
So far this year, employers have added a solid average of 215,000 jobs a month, up from a monthly average of 194,000 in 2013 and 186,000 in 2012.
Companies have been slower to offer workers decent pay increases, but that may finally be changing, Baumohl says.
Workers’ inflation-adjusted earnings rose 0.4 percent in August, the Labor Department said Wednesday. It was the sharpest monthly gain in more than a year.
Consumers, long beaten down by the recession’s bleak aftermath, have been feeling more hopeful. A measure of consumer confidence by the Conference Board reached a seven-year high last month.
And after shrinking their debt loads for years after the recession officially ended in 2009, consumers are pulling out their credit cards again.
Their borrowing rose in July at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 9.7 percent. That matched April’s increase for the fastest growth in three years.
From April through June, consumer spending rose at an annual pace of 2.5 percent — twice the pace of the first three months of the year, when a harsh winter kept many shoppers home.
The retailers’ ratcheted-up holiday hiring ‘‘reflects both the positive momentum in the economy this year and the realization on the part of both retailers and delivery services that their performance has to improve’’ over last year’s, said Patrick O’Keefe, director of economic research at the accounting and consulting firm CohnReznick.
The National Retail Federation, the nation’s largest retail trade group, has not yet issued its 2014 holiday sales forecast. Last year’s holiday sales, including online business, rose 3.8 percent to $601.8 billion, from 2012.
But stores were unprepared for a stronger-than-expected last-minute online sales surge.
Online sales jumped 10 percent to $46.5 billion for November and December, according to comScore, a research firm.
This time, carriers such as UPS aim to be sufficiently staffed. Their hiring plans aren’t counted in Challenger’s tally of retailers.
But he suggested that their increased hiring plans point to expectations for a strong season.