Clackamas Town Center Begins Holiday Season Hiring

Clackamas Town Center, one of the largest shopping malls in the Portland metro area, is seeing retailers begin their annual push to staff up for the holiday shopping season. Seasonal hiring at the mall typically starts in late September and early October, well ahead of Black Friday and the holiday rush, as stores look to get new employees trained before the busiest weeks of the year, when foot traffic and transaction volume can run several times higher than a typical weekend.

The mall is one of the larger employment hubs in the Clackamas area, drawing workers from throughout the unincorporated community and neighboring cities, and seasonal positions each year range from retail sales floor jobs to mall-wide services like gift wrapping and guest services during the peak season. Several individual retailers post their own seasonal listings directly, while others work through the mall's general job board, and some larger anchor stores run dedicated hiring events with same-day interviews to fill dozens of positions at once.

For many seasonal hires, the positions offer a foot in the door for permanent retail work — a meaningful number of seasonal employees each year are offered extended or permanent positions once the holiday rush winds down, particularly at stores that saw strong sales and want to retain trained staff rather than starting over with new hires each spring. Pay rates for seasonal retail work have also climbed in recent years as stores compete for workers in a tight labor market, with many positions now advertising rates well above the state minimum wage to attract applicants early in the hiring season.

Opened in 1981 and expanded several times since, the mall remains a significant draw not just for shoppers but for the transit infrastructure built around it — the Clackamas Town Center Transit Center, served by TriMet's MAX Green Line, gives the mall one of the better transit connections of any major shopping center in the region, a fact seasonal workers without reliable car access often cite as a factor in applying there specifically over other retail options around the metro area.

For a community that, unlike its incorporated neighbors, doesn't have a city government running its own economic development programs, the mall remains one of Clackamas's most visible economic anchors, alongside nearby employers like Kaiser Permanente's local hospital campus. The mall's holiday hiring numbers are often treated informally as a signal of broader retail health heading into the season, and mall management has in past years highlighted strong seasonal hiring as evidence that in-person shopping remains resilient even as online retail continues to grow its share of holiday spending nationally.

Nationally, retailers have reported mixed signals heading into recent holiday seasons, with some chains scaling back seasonal hiring in favor of leaning more heavily on existing staff and automation, while others have expanded seasonal headcounts to meet growing e-commerce fulfillment and curbside-pickup demand that didn't exist at the same scale a decade ago. Mall-based retailers in particular have had to adapt their seasonal staffing models as more holiday shopping shifts online, with some stores now hiring seasonal workers specifically for fulfillment and pickup roles rather than purely traditional sales-floor positions. Local economists who track regional retail employment say mall hiring numbers, while not a perfect indicator, still offer a useful early read on how confident retailers are feeling about the holiday spending outlook in a given year.