Ed Davidson, owner of Bivouac in downtown Ann Arbor, plans to hire holiday help.

Angela J. Cesere | AnnArbor.com

Ann Arbor-area retailers appear to be making modest plans to hire seasonal help as they gear up for a holiday shopping season that many hope will merely keep pace with last year.

Store owners, some of whom are starting to interview candidates for temporary, mostly part-time jobs in areas like Internet orders and gift wrapping, say they’ve managed to tread water amid a deep recession and tepid consumer confidence.

Many credit the presence in Ann Arbor of a major university and the city’s relatively lower unemployment rate for bucking the trend of Southeast Michigan.

“With the return to campus in August, we’ve definitely seen a change in business, and with the cold weather, more so,” said Harvey Kanter, president and CEO of Moosejaw Mountaineering & Backcountry Travel Inc.

The outdoor equipment and apparel retailer, which operates seven stores in Michigan and Chicago, had already hired five associates for its downtown Ann Arbor store and planned to hire two more in early November. Moosejaw also planned to hire 150 seasonal workers to help process Internet orders and help customers from its Madison Heights warehouse.

“It’s been a challenging spring, but it’s been an uplifting fall so far,” Kanter said.

Statewide, retailers this year are not expected to hire seasonal workers in significant numbers, said Tom Scott, a senior vice president for the Michigan Retailers Association. The group’s annual holiday sales forecast will be released later this month.

The National Retail Federation expects holiday sales nationwide to dip 1 percent after a 3.4 percent slide in 2008.

“We’re not going to see any real expansion of holiday hiring this season,” Scott said. “But even just status quo is somewhat positive in this current environment.”

Zingerman’s reportedly was interviewing candidates for seasonal job openings at its various business divisions when contacted, but did not respond to an interview request.

Toys’R’Us, which operates a store at Arborland Center, said recently it planned to hire 35,000 seasonal workers for its 848 U.S. stores, a number equal to the holiday workforce hired during each of the previous two years.

“We always need more people,” said Ed Davidson, owner of the Bivouac clothier and outdoor equipment store on State Street. “There’s the factor of gift wrapping is involved, and we are more crowded.

“Even last year, when it was in the middle of the recession, we still needed someome to gift-wrap or more people on the floor, because December is still more significant than other months.”

Other stores have no plans to hire extra staff for the busy months.

At Crazy Wisdom, everyone works part-time and will likely be happy to log the extra hours, bookstore manager Rachel Pastiva said.

“We’re expecting it to be similar to what it was like last year, that sales will be down, but we are hoping that people are still going to be coming out buying things over the holidays,” Pastiva said. “People will be buying less expensive gifts, probably.”

At Hollander’s, a seller of decorative papers and hand bookbinding supplies in Kerrytown, co-owner Tom Hollander said there’s been no letdown in sales compared with last year. He and wife Cindy have no plans to bring on additional staff despite opening a kitchen store earlier this year.

“We feel pretty good about it, just from the way traffic has been since we first opened, we feel like we’ll do well,” he said. “We’re bringing in a lot of new (holiday) product with that in mind."

The Learning Express, a specialty toy retailer on the city’s west side, already has hired a few additional workers to help with customer service during the holidays, said Kat Klausner, assistant store manager. The store also plans to hire a couple high-school students to wrap gifts part-time after school.

“We’re a toy store, so we do something like between 40 and 50 percent of our business for the whole year during the holidays,” Klausner said. “We’re always running around.

“Usually it’s everybody’s favorite time of year, the kids are running around the store and it’s fun to help parents look for gifts… and there’s something exciting about being part of the busy, bustling season.”

While retailers acknowledge recent Decembers have fallen, Bivouac’s Davidson say they benefit from the city’s relatively stable economy. Major employers like the University of Michigan and Domino’s Pizza have largely avoided the large-scale layoffs that have cut business deeply in other areas.

“I know that unemployment here is much less than the rest of the state,” Davidson said. “So we’ve not been hit as hard inside Ann Arbor.

“But the merchants in the community certainly rely on people coming into town from outlying areas, which have been hit. And that will be a factor.”

&bull; Contact Sven Gustafson at sventg123 (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow him at <a href="http://twitter.com/sveng">twitter.com/sveng</a>.