Big Lots workers see steady retail wages, strong supervisor career paths

What the numbers say about staying in retail

Big Lots workers do not need a fantasy version of retail to make sense of their options. The better lens is the one the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics uses: retail sales work is a large, steady occupation with modest pay, limited overall growth, and a lot of churn that keeps openings flowing. In 2024, retail sales workers earned a median of $34,730 a year, or $16.70 an hour, and the occupation numbered 4,208,800 workers nationwide.

That flat headline can sound discouraging until you look at the openings. BLS projects little or no change in retail sales employment from 2024 to 2034, but still expects about 586,000 openings each year on average. Those openings do not come from explosive growth. They come from turnover, retirements, and workers moving into other jobs. For someone on a Big Lots sales floor, that means the market is not built on endless expansion, but it is also not frozen shut.

Retail sales work also remains accessible. BLS says most retail sales workers learn on the job and usually do not need formal education to enter the occupation. The tradeoff is schedule pressure: evenings and weekends are common. That is the real operating rhythm of the job, and it is why many workers think of retail as a bridge role rather than a final stop.

Where the career ladder gets real

The clearest long-term path in retail is supervision. BLS says first-line supervisors of retail sales workers directly supervise and coordinate retail sales staff, and may also handle purchasing, budgeting, accounting, and personnel work. That is a meaningful jump in responsibility, not just a title change. It is also the role where a store worker starts to move from executing tasks to making decisions about how the store runs.

The pay difference matters. In the BLS occupational employment data, first-line supervisors of retail sales workers had a mean hourly wage of $25.01 and a mean annual wage of $52,030. The median wage in the table was $22.47 an hour, or $46,730 a year. Compared with the 2024 median for retail sales workers, that is a sizeable step up, and it shows why learning the supervisor track can be more valuable than chasing random exits out of retail.

The employment base is large, too. BLS estimated 1,087,890 first-line supervisors of retail sales workers in May 2023. That scale matters because it means the role is not a niche promotion path reserved for a few flagship stores. It is a broad labor market with a defined rung between floor work and management.

Why this matters even in a flat market

The U.S. Census Bureau puts the broader retail labor market in perspective: in 2022, 9.2 million workers were employed as retail salespersons, cashiers, or first-line supervisors of retail sales workers, and about 3 million of them were first-line supervisors. Retail is still one of the country’s biggest job categories, even though its share of the workforce has shrunk.

That shrinkage tells its own story. The retail share of U.S. workers fell from 6.9% in 2010 to 5.6% in 2022. Some formats lost ground badly. Department-store retail employment fell from about 389,000 in 2010 to about 189,000 in 2022. Other formats grew fast, especially electronic shopping, which rose from about 63,000 workers to about 165,000 over the same period.

The lesson for Big Lots employees is not that retail is dying. It is that retail keeps reorganizing. Stores, warehouses, and e-commerce operations are shifting under the same umbrella, and workers who know the basics of merchandising, customer service, scheduling, and shrink prevention stay useful as the model changes. In a market like that, the people who learn how to run a shift often end up with more options than the people who only wait for growth to arrive.

Big Lots’ restructuring changed the stakes, not the skill set

Big Lots’ own situation makes the BLS data more relevant, not less. According to its SEC filing, the company operated 1,392 stores in 48 states and an e-commerce platform as of May 4, 2024. Then the company filed voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware on September 9, 2024, turning what might have been abstract labor-market talk into a very immediate question about jobs, hours, and where the work would go next.

On December 27, 2024, Big Lots announced a sale transaction with Gordon Brothers Retail Partners. The deal called for Variety Wholesalers to acquire between 200 and 400 Big Lots stores and up to two distribution centers, and the company said Variety Wholesalers may employ Big Lots associates at the acquired stores, the distribution centers, and some corporate roles. Big Lots CEO Bruce Thorn said the sale offered the strongest opportunity to preserve jobs and ensure continuity of the brand. Variety Wholesalers CEO Lisa Seigies said the company intended to provide a path forward for the brand and hundreds of stores.

For workers, the key point is practical: restructuring does not erase the need for trained store employees. It reshuffles where those employees are needed. When a chain shrinks, sells stores, or hands assets to a new operator, the most valuable people are often the ones who can keep inventory moving, keep the floor organized, and keep a team steady through messy transitions.

How to use your current job as a stepping stone

If you are working at Big Lots now, the most useful way to read the labor data is as a map of what to learn next. The biggest mistake is treating the sales floor as a dead end. The better strategy is to turn the job itself into training for the supervisor role, because the skills overlap more than people think.

A useful progression looks like this:

• Learn replenishment and how product gets from back room to shelf.
• Pay attention to how department decisions are made, especially during busy periods.
• Ask how scheduling is built and how coverage changes by daypart.
• Practice clear communication with customers, peers, and managers.
• Watch shrink prevention closely, because supervisors are often measured on it.

Those are not abstract soft skills. They are the everyday habits that separate a dependable sales worker from someone ready to run a shift. If the long-term goal is a pay jump into the mid-40s or low-50s, then each task on the floor can be treated as evidence that you can handle more responsibility.

The bottom line for Big Lots workers

Retail is not offering a clean growth story right now, and Big Lots’ own restructuring has made that harder to ignore. But the labor market is still large, still active, and still full of exits and promotions. For workers willing to stay in the field, the supervisor track is the clearest path to higher pay and more control over the day-to-day.

That is the real takeaway from the numbers: retail may be flat, but the ladder is still there. The people who keep learning the job, not just doing it, are the ones most likely to move when the next opening appears.