Retailers draw attention for holiday hiring
Major retailers are gearing up for the holiday season, but it's not the early sales or festive decor that's appealing to the public, it's the seasonal hiring boom.
Stores are hiring thousands of workers nationwide, with Aldi, Target, Amazon, and UPS all landing in the headlines for adopting similar approaches. However, thanks to one key decision, Aldi outshone the rest in terms of engagement, despite not getting as much coverage.
In addition to hiring 13,000 holiday workers, Aldi made waves by announcing it would increase its minimum wage to $18, and $23 for warehouse jobs. The move came in early September, well before any competitors signaled their own hiring plans, and garnered significant attention from local news outlets across the country, with Fox 2 Detroit having the most engaged article overall.
It should be noted that even with these companies attempting to stay true to their commitment to recruiting efforts and competitive wages, many are hiring less or only just as many holiday workers as they did last year. Many consumers also remain wary of high prices, making this holiday season a tougher one for retailers to navigate, especially when doing so under the spotlight of social media.
Misinformation surges following Hurricane Helene
Social media can be a tough place in an information vacuum, and that has been demonstrated in the wake of Hurricane Helene. During the ongoing response, rumors abounded about funding and actions taken by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Many of these claims, which came in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, have since been debunked or revised.Before this though, some of them were amplified by national figures, including former President Trump stating that FEMA was actively blocking aid for the Republican areas.
There have since been thousands of articles written to try to correct the record, and make sure that accurate information disseminates, but this only began to happen in the last few days in earnest, after rumors had already been spreading for days. The graph below shows the timeline of media and public interest in those articles.
FEMA set up a response page on Oct 3rd to debunk false claims, which has itself accumulated over 174k engagements, more than any other article reporting on the issue.
This shows the power that trust can still have on social media, particularly during times of crisis. FEMA's website is hardly the kind of thing you'd expect to go viral, but given the circumstances, people are often looking to share a trusted news source, and in this case FEMA eventually filled that gap — albeit after rumors had run wild for a few days.
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