Amazon to hire 80k holiday workers

Amazon is hiring 80,000 seasonal workers for its fulfillment centers in order to keep up with customer demand throughout the holiday season, the company said Thursday.

Its hiring plans represent a 14% increase over last year's 70,000 seasonal workers, 10,000 of which became full-time employees.

Amazon has more than 50 fulfillment centers and will have more than 15 sorting centers by the end of the year, where packages are sorted by ZIP code and then transported to U.S. Postal Service offices.

The company says the sorting centers help Amazon offer services such as Sunday delivery, a later cutoff order time and tighter control over shipping logistics.

Amazon's announcement follows several other major retailers that all plan to increase hiring for the biggest shopping period of the year.

· Walmart is hiring 60,000 holiday workers, nearly 10% more than last year.

· Target will hire 70,000 new employees and give current employees more hours than in previous years during peak shopping days like Black Friday.

· Gap announced earlier this week it will hire 63,000 seasonal employees.

· UPS is hiring between 90,000 and 95,000 holiday workers in an effort to keep up with more online orders and avoid last year's Christmastime disaster that left thousands of customers without packages in time for the holiday.

The pace of hiring at a retailer can serve as an indicator of expectations for the holiday shopping season, which accounts for 20 percent of the industry's annual sales, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group.

Seattle-based Amazon is hoping to avoid problems that occurred late in the holiday season last year, when shippers such as UPS were caught off guard by spiking online orders, particularly from Amazon.com.

Overall, the National Retail Federation said it expects holiday sales to increase 4.1 percent to $616.9 billion, up a percentage point higher than last year. It marks the highest increase since 2011 when the rise was 4.8 percent. Shoppers will spend an average of about $800, NRF says.

Amazon employs more than 132,600 full-time and part-time employees globally.

Contributing: Associated Press