Andrew Yang on retail: what the evidence says · JRE #1245
“Being a retail worker is the most common job in the United States right now. The average retail worker is a 39-year-old woman with a high school education making between $11 and $12 an hour.”
What the evidence says
Yang's stump-speech claim, repeated with varying wage figures across interviews, describes retail work as the single most common US job and its typical worker as a 39-year-old woman earning $11-12 an hour. Census Bureau analysis of 2018 American Community Survey data found that retail salespersons, cashiers, and first-line retail supervisors together made up 9.8 million workers, and that the retail workforce as a whole skewed young and female: over half of retail workers were age 16 to 34, and 56.5% were women. Retail salespersons alone (excluding the lower-paid, heavily female cashier occupation, which the Census Bureau classifies separately) had median annual earnings of $35,301 in 2018, well above the roughly $23,000-25,000 that $11-12 an hour would represent for a full-time worker; cashiers, a distinct and lower-paid occupation, had median earnings of $22,109. The Census Bureau's own title for this analysis, "Retail Jobs Among the Most Common Occupations," supports Yang's general point that retail work is among the most common types of work, though it stops short of singling retail out as the single most common job ahead of all others. The available data therefore support Yang's general point that retail work is low-wage and disproportionately held by young women, but the specific age (39, versus a workforce skewing 16-34) and the merged "retail worker" wage figure (which understates pay for retail salespersons specifically while more closely describing cashiers) are each imprecise or not fully supported by the underlying statistics.
- Retail Jobs Among the Most Common Occupations · government