According to the New York Times, full-time employees in retail generally make less than $33,000 a year. The same article states that “42 percent of retail workers earn a low hourly wage — defined as less than two-thirds of the median wage across the economy.”
What’s more, 29 percent of low wage women in retail live in or near poverty, 49 percent of all retail workers are women, and 55 percent of all low-wage retail workers are women, according to a 2014 study in Demos by Amy Traub. On top of that, a 2015 Demos report by Catherine Ruetschlin and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad states that 70 percent of Black and Latino full and part-time retail sales workers earn less than $15 per hour, as compared to 58 percent of white retail workers.
