At Crate & Barrel at Providence Place Mall, Sarah Hunt, of Providence, is taught how to deal with customers at the service desk. The store has hired a dozen employees for the holidays, about the same number as last year.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

The days when clusters of eager store employees were ready to help with your holiday shopping are gone, yet another victim of hard times.

Retailers in Rhode Island, buffeted by bad economic news in a state with 13-percent unemployment, are wary about bringing on new workers. Holiday hiring in the state is about the same in 2009 as it was in 2008 — and last year fewer than half as many holiday workers were hired as in 2006.

National retail experts said shopping may very well be one long self-help lesson this holiday. For stores, the challenge is to keep customers happy, and buying, even with smaller staffs.

“Products don’t sell themselves,” said Marie Kelly, manager of Crate & Barrel at Providence Place mall. “People need to be there who can make a connection with the customer.” Last week, Kelly was training the dozen seasonal employees who will be working at Crate & Barrel for this year’s holidays, about the same number the store employed in 2008.

Kelly said seasonal employees need to be brought up to speed more quickly than full-time workers. While they still need to know how to run a cash register, Crate & Barrel is trying to focus even more on customer service and salesmanship. It’s crucial that Crate & Barrel shoppers have a positive experience, Kelly said, or else they may not come back. “The customer could go anywhere. In this mall alone, there are multiple places that sell goods for the home.”

National projections call for a lean Christmas, with total sales and per-capita consumer spending both down from 2008. Already, stores are offering deep discounts to attract customers.

As for hiring, there are a few bright spots, such as video game retailer GameStop’s announcement that it would hire 15,000 seasonal workers nationwide this year. But a recent report from job experts Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. found hiring in October, when the holiday job season gets under way, off to a slow start.

At Crate & Barrel, Kelly said the store managed its payroll budget with an eye towards having enough help for the holidays. She said the store received hundreds of applications for temporary jobs, applicants who tended to be older and more experienced than temporary job seekers in years past.

About 40 percent of stores surveyed in late summer by human-resource consultants Hay Group said they expected to hire between 5 percent and 25 percent fewer temporary workers for the 2009 holiday season than for the same period in 2008.

Sonny Chung, owner of Caponhead, a hat and cap store in the Warwick Mall, said three years ago he would hire two or three extra workers for the holidays. Not this year. At best, Chung said, he might hire someone for a week or two if things get busy. “This situation is the worst I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Having fewer people on the shop floor would seem to put a premium on customer service –– those little extra touches salespeople can do to clinch a purchase; a timely “Hello,” offering a hand finding the right-sized cardigan, a compliment for the women trying on a new dress.

Unfortunately, customer service mostly has been in short supply, and isn’t about to make a return in time for this season, said retail industry observers.

Keith Murray snorted across the telephone line when asked about his expectations for customer service during the holidays –– a period that can account for half or more of annual sales for some retailers. “I haven’t seen that in a long time,” said Murray, a marketing professor and the associate dean of the business school at Bryant University.

Hiring people with the wrong attitude, or who have poor work skills, just creates a downward spiral, said Melanie St. Jean, an associate professor of retail marketing and fashion merchandising at Johnson & Wales University. “Everything depends on service: What is going to bring people back into your store is the service,” she said. “If you have no customer service it affects sales; if sales decrease then employees’ hours are cut.”

Generally, retailers allocate an amount equal to about 6 to 8 percent of a store’s annual sales to salaries –– including everyone from the janitor to the manager. Lower sales mean less work for hourly employees, or simply fewer employees altogether. Smaller paychecks for employees mean they have less to spend elsewhere, spreading the economic pain to workers in other businesses, who then have less to spend themselves. “It’s a vicious cycle,” St. Jean said.

Paul Adam, assistant manager at Crate & Barrel, said employees are expected be knowledgeable about the products they sell — whether a bowl is dishwasher safe, for example. And he explained about “enhancing” a sale, sometimes called upselling. So if a customer is interested in red wine glasses, you might also point out the benefits of Crate & Barrel’s red wine aerator.

Most of all, he said, Crate & Barrel employees are expected to create an enjoyable atmosphere for the customer. “Our whole philosophy on the sales floor is that you’re meeting and greeting all the customers,” he said.

Sarah Hunt of Providence said she already has two different part-time jobs working for a neurosurgery practice in Smithfield, but was looking for additional work. She said she applied for a full-time job at Crate & Barrel over the summer, but didn’t get it.

“Then they called and said ‘We need you now.’ I feel pretty lucky,” she said, “I know how much unemployment there is in Rhode Island, and I refuse to be one of those statistics.”

pgrimald@projo.com