Stockers and order fillers
Also called Stocker, Order filler, Retail stock associate, Stock clerk, Warehouse picker
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 2,833,810 US stockers and order fillers, with median pay of $37,330 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 2,872,680, in May 2023, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 80,000 from 1890, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for stockers and order fillers: Amazon Kiva acquisition + Walmart Bossa Nova pilot, 2012 to 2020. The Walmart Bossa Nova termination in retail is the canonical counter-example to automatic displacement: human workers proved more flexible in ambiguous physical environments.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects employment to grow 8.9% from 2025 to 2035.
AI exposure studies
- 19.1% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
- 0.64 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Stockers and order fillers: jobs and pay since 1890 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7065
Future History. "Stockers and order fillers: jobs and pay since 1890." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7065.
@misc{futurehistory_53_7065, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Stockers and order fillers: jobs and pay since 1890}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-7065}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
The access date is today's date on your device.
≈ $36,373 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
George Gilman and George Hartford open the first Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company store in New York City, inaugurating the American chain-grocery model. A&P's founding concept (standardized stores in many locations, buying tea in bulk directly from importers to undercut local merchant prices) made systematic restocking a business necessity for the first time. A single general store's owner could personally manage inventory; 200 stores required a replicable restocking system. By 1880 A&P had 95 stores; by 1900, 200; by 1912, 400. The chain grocery model created the shelf stocker's job by creating the scale at which it was worth paying someone specifically to do it.
Sears, Roebuck and Company opens its Chicago mail-order warehouse complex, for a moment the largest commercial building in the world, covering 3.4 million square feet and employing over 9,000 workers. The facility is a prototype of the modern fulfillment center: goods received at one end, sorted by product type, picked against catalog orders, and shipped by rail and parcel post. Workers move through the building pulling specific items from specific bins to fill customer orders: the physical activity indistinguishable from what an Amazon picker does 116 years later. Sears invented the warehouse-fulfillment work model that Amazon would scale to continental dimensions.
September 6, 1916: Clarence Saunders opens the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, Tennessee, and invents self-service grocery retail. Before Piggly Wiggly, a customer asked a clerk for each item; the clerk fetched it from behind the counter. In Saunders's design, customers walked the aisles themselves and selected products from open shelving. This apparently simple change made the shelf stocker's work visible and consequential in a way it had never been: an empty shelf in a clerk-served store meant a slow clerk; an empty shelf in a self-service store was a direct lost sale the customer could see. Shelf fullness, facing discipline (label forward, undamaged), and stock rotation became measurable, accountable, customer-facing quality attributes overnight.
July 2, 1962: Sam Walton opens the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas. His earliest insight (that distribution efficiency, not selling skill, was the constraint on discount retail profitability) eventually produced the largest private employment infrastructure in American history. Walmart's first distribution center opened in Bentonville in 1971. By 1983 it had computerized point-of-sale systems in all stores. By 1987 it had installed the largest private satellite communication network in the US, linking its stores and suppliers in a just-in-time replenishment loop. By 1992 it had 371,000 associates across 1,928 stores. By 2015 it had 2.3 million associates. The stocker is the human node in that distribution system, the person who translates an inbound truck into a stocked shelf, and Walmart's growth made it the largest single employer of stockers in history.
June 26, 1974: A cashier at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, runs a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum across a barcode scanner, the first retail scan using the Universal Product Code standard ratified in April 1974. The event seems modest; its consequences for stockers are enormous. Every product now requires a legible, standardized barcode in the correct orientation on the shelf facing. Price tags migrate from individual products to shelf-edge labels. Inventory systems can track what sold and calculate what remains. Within a decade, point-of-sale barcode systems feed directly into replenishment systems, making the stocker's daily task list increasingly data-directed rather than judgment-directed. The job does not shrink, SKU variety and store size grow to absorb the efficiency, but it changes from craft to protocol.
March 19, 2012: Amazon announces the acquisition of Kiva Systems for $775 million, at the time its largest acquisition. The Kiva robot carries entire inventory shelving pods on its back to stationary human workers, eliminating the walking component of warehouse picking. Amazon pulls Kiva from the open market after the acquisition; competitors are forced to develop alternatives. Amazon deploys the first Kiva (Amazon Robotics) systems in 2013-2014. By 2019: 200,000 robots. By 2024: 750,000+. Every major retailer, 3PL, and logistics provider that handles e-commerce fulfillment subsequently acquires or builds comparable autonomous mobile robot fleets. This is the largest concentrated robotics investment ever aimed at a single occupational category. And yet BLS OEWS records 2,779,530 stocker and order filler jobs in 2024, more than pre-Kiva. The Bessen-2015 paradox in its clearest physical form.
May 2018: Kroger and Ocado Group announce an exclusive US partnership to build automated Customer Fulfillment Centers using Ocado's proprietary robotic grid system, dense 3D storage arrays where autonomous bots retrieve individual totes while workers handle final packing and exceptions. The partnership was a direct response to the e-commerce grocery challenge: how to pick a 50-item grocery order accurately and efficiently without the per-order labor cost of a human walking a store floor. Ocado's technology, developed over two decades in the UK, achieves 99.4% order accuracy at throughput rates far exceeding manual picking. The first Kroger-Ocado US CFC opened in Monroe, Ohio in 2021. The CFC model blurs the distinction between the retail shelf stocker and the warehouse order filler: both functions increasingly coexist in hybrid micro-fulfillment formats embedded inside large grocery stores.
November 2020: Walmart terminates its contract with Bossa Nova Robotics, ending a shelf-scanning robot pilot that had reached approximately 500 stores since 2017. The Bossa Nova robot patrolled store aisles using computer vision to identify out-of-stocks, misplaced products, and incorrect price labels: tasks stockers had traditionally done manually through aisle-walk routines. Walmart's reported conclusion: human workers equipped with handheld devices performed these tasks more flexibly and cost-effectively, especially in the complex, ambiguous environment of a live retail store full of customers. The termination was widely reported as a significant moment in the retail-robotics story: a well-funded, technically capable robot failing against a cost-effective human solution in an environment that was simply too variable and socially complex for the robot to navigate reliably.
BLS National Employment Matrix records 2,764,800 workers in SOC 53-7065, and projects 2,999,800 by 2034, crossing 3 million workers for the first time. This is the occupation's highest headcount in recorded history, achieved a decade into the 750,000+ Amazon robot deployment and four years after the Walmart Bossa Nova termination. The BLS projects a further +8.5% growth over 2024-2034, well above the all-occupation average. The robots changed the job: less walking in Amazon FCs, more machine-coordinated picking, electronic shelf labels replacing manual price tags in some retail formats. They did not shrink the workforce. E-commerce, which now accounts for approximately 16.9% of US retail sales (Q1 2026) and continues growing at ~10% annually, keeps adding order-filling volume faster than automation absorbs it.
Will AI replace stockers and order fillers? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for stockers and order fillers
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is sitting alongside you herePick individual product units for outbound orders using voice-directed picking workflows, wearing a headset connected to the WMS voice application, listening to spoken location and SKU pick instructions, confirming each pick location by speaking the check digit aloud, scanning the product barcode or confirming by voice, meeting the engineered labor standard units-per-hour target set for the facility or store back-room, and placing picked units in totes or order cartons.
Pick individual product units for outbound orders using voice-directed picking workflows, wearing a headset connected to the WMS voice application, listening to spoken location and SKU pick instructions, confirming each pick location by speaking the check digit aloud, scanning the product barcode or confirming by voice, meeting the engineered labor standard units-per-hour target set for the facility or store back-room, and placing picked units in totes or order cartons.[8],[9]
Voice picking is the current standard for both accuracy and productivity in fulfillment operations. Workers who learn to use the voice workflow efficiently, minimizing confirmation hesitation, learning check-digit patterns, and pacing their movement to the voice prompts rather than stopping to read a device screen, consistently outperform those on paper or scan-only workflows. Rate performance in voice-pick zones is tracked to the individual; high performers have first choice of shift and zone assignment.
AI is sitting alongside you hereWork at a goods-to-person AMR station where autonomous mobile robots deliver product totes or pick carts to a stationary workstation, scanning delivered items to confirm correct SKU and quantity, picking units into order cartons or totes, returning completed picks to the AMR for transport to the next station, monitoring for robot error states (navigation blockage, battery-low) and clearing minor jams within authorized scope, and reporting persistent robot faults to the on-shift robotics technician.
Work at a goods-to-person AMR station where autonomous mobile robots deliver product totes or pick carts to a stationary workstation, scanning delivered items to confirm correct SKU and quantity, picking units into order cartons or totes, returning completed picks to the AMR for transport to the next station, monitoring for robot error states (navigation blockage, battery-low) and clearing minor jams within authorized scope, and reporting persistent robot faults to the on-shift robotics technician.[10],[11]
Associates who understand how AMR systems work, not just how to pick from a delivered tote, but how to recognize when the robot is off its route, what error states require a technician versus a simple re-queue, and how to adapt pace when the AMR cadence slows due to congestion, are assigned to the most productive zones and are first considered for robot lead and floor coordinator roles as facilities scale up.
AI is sitting alongside you hereFulfill click-and-collect and curbside pickup orders (BOPIS) by receiving order pick lists on a WMS-connected handheld device, walking store aisles or a dedicated order-picking zone to select items by scanning product barcodes to confirm correct pick, substituting out-of-stock items per WMS substitution rules or calling for customer approval, staging completed orders in designated pickup slots by order number, and scanning order-complete confirmation for handoff to the customer.
Fulfill click-and-collect and curbside pickup orders (BOPIS) by receiving order pick lists on a WMS-connected handheld device, walking store aisles or a dedicated order-picking zone to select items by scanning product barcodes to confirm correct pick, substituting out-of-stock items per WMS substitution rules or calling for customer approval, staging completed orders in designated pickup slots by order number, and scanning order-complete confirmation for handoff to the customer.[3],[12]
BOPIS fulfillment is the growth side of this occupation. Retailers who deploy AMRs or automated pick carts (Zebra Symmetry, Locus) in store-embedded fulfillment centers use them to bring product to a stationary human packer. Workers who adapt to device-directed picking workflows and hit accuracy and order-cycle-time targets are assigned to the highest-volume shifts. Substitution judgment, knowing which substitutes a customer will accept versus reject, is a human skill that builds over time and resists automation.
Where stockers and order fillers go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers
- US median pay
- $107,230 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +6.1%
- Production, Planning, and Expediting Clerks
- US median pay
- $59,650 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- -1.3%
- Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks
- US median pay
- $45,260 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- -7.6%
- First-Line Supervisors of Material-Moving Machine and Vehicle OperatorsNo timeline for this role yet
What each move takes
Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers
Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers oversee entire warehouse or distribution operations. This is a long-horizon pivot requiring several years of progressive warehouse experience combined with formal education (associate or bachelor in logistics, supply chain, or business administration) and demonstrated management capability. Workers who move from stocker to supervisor to operations manager via the internal promotion track at major retailers (Walmart, Target, Amazon) or 3PLs represent the primary pipeline. The appeal is clear: the same operational knowledge that stockers build from the floor up is exactly what effective DC managers need.
- · Associate or bachelor degree in supply chain management, logistics, or business administration
- · P&L and budget management basics for DC operations
- · Labor planning and workforce scheduling using facility WFM (workforce management) tools
- · OSHA 30-hour General Industry certification
- · Advanced WMS configuration and reporting (SAP EWM, Manhattan Associates, Blue Yonder)
How has the work of stockers and order fillers changed since 1859?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Hand-carry + hand truck + manual manifest (clerk-served retail era)
In the clerk-served general store, the dominant retail form from colonial times through the early twentieth century, a customer entered and asked a clerk for what they needed; the clerk fetched each item from behind a counter or from a back stockroom. Keeping shelves and stockrooms filled was simple: when the barrel of molasses or crate of canned goods ran low, someone carried more from the back. The tools were elemental: a two-wheeled hand truck for moving wooden crates and barrels, a paper manifest for checking incoming shipments against purchase orders, and enough manual strength to stack flour sacks. The work was integrated into the general duties of all store employees rather than specialized. The scale of any individual store was small enough that no one's full-time job was simply moving and facing stock. Chain grocery stores (A&P from 1859, Kroger from 1883) began to formalize the restocking role as their store counts multiplied (each store needed someone who knew the supplier delivery schedule, the back-stock rotation discipline, and the shelf layout) but specialization remained partial.
Effect on the workEmployment in retail stockroom work grew slowly and continuously with overall retail expansion. No technology during this era reduced the workforce; growth in consumer demand translated directly to growth in the need for hands to stock shelves.
Piggly Wiggly self-service (1916) + supermarket format (King Kullen 1930): shelves become the store
On September 6, 1916, Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tennessee, and transformed what restocking a retail store meant. In the old clerk-served model, the product on the shelf was almost incidental: the clerk retrieved what the customer wanted from inventory. In Saunders's self-service model, the shelf was the entire interface. Customers walked the aisles, picked up products, examined them, and made choices based on what they could see and reach. A bare shelf was a lost sale in a way that a slow clerk never was. The shelf stocker's job went from "keeping inventory available" to "creating the customer-facing product experience." Facing the products correctly (label forward, taller to the back), rotating stock (older product pulled forward, newer pushed behind), and maintaining the plan-o-gram (the diagram specifying exactly which SKU appeared in which shelf slot) became formalized disciplines. King Kullen opened the first American supermarket in Jamaica, Queens, in 1930: a large-format, high-volume store with a much wider product range than any previous grocery. The supermarket format, which spread rapidly through the 1930s and exploded post-WWII, created the overnight stocking crew as a fixture of American retail: too many SKUs to face and restock during store hours without blocking customers, so crews worked from midnight to 5 a.m. to reset sections and fill empty shelves.
Effect on the workSelf-service retail more than doubled the importance of shelf-stocking as a distinct job function. The overnight crew became a standard feature of supermarkets by the 1940s, and the total workforce in retail stock work grew substantially with the post-war supermarket construction boom.
Walmart founding (1962) + computerized inventory (late 1960s) + big-box expansion
On July 2, 1962, Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas. The innovation was not the store itself, discount retail already existed, but the logistics system behind it. Walton's earliest insight, documented in his autobiography, was that the distribution function (how goods got from supplier to shelf) was the constraint on retail profitability, not the selling function. Walmart invested in computerized inventory systems before most of its competitors; by the late 1960s it was using electronic systems to track stock levels, trigger reorders, and standardize the replenishment cycle that stockers executed daily. The computerized inventory system did not eliminate the stocker's work, every case still had to be physically moved from the receiving dock to the floor, but it disciplined it, making the replenishment cycle predictable and the out-of-stock rate visible and accountable. The stocker went from a worker who exercised judgment about what to fill to a worker who executed a system-generated priority list.
Effect on the workBig-box retail expansion through the 1960s drove substantial employment growth. Walmart's computerization of inventory made stocking work more data-directed without reducing headcount; it enabled larger stores with more SKUs that required proportionally more stocking labor.
UPC barcode (1974) + RF scanner + Warehouse Management System (WMS)
The Universal Product Code was standardized in April 1974; the first retail scan occurred June 26, 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The barcode changed the stocker's daily work in several ways. Every product now required a properly oriented, undamaged barcode in a standardized shelf location, facing discipline (ensuring the barcode faces outward and is undamaged) became part of every stocking routine. Price-tag application gradually moved from individual products to shelf-edge labels, reducing per-item stocking time. Inventory accuracy improved dramatically: previously, the only way to know what was on a shelf was to look; with barcodes and a point-of-sale system, the store knew in real time what had sold and could calculate what theoretically remained. Walmart's satellite-linked EDI (electronic data interchange) system, installed by 1987 and the largest private satellite network in the US at that time, enabled just-in-time replenishment: the store's inventory system communicated directly with suppliers' systems, triggering automatic shipments to Walmart's distribution centers when stock dropped below thresholds. Radio-frequency handheld scanners entered warehouse and retail stockrooms through the 1990s, allowing stockers to scan received shipments for accuracy, pull work orders from WMS systems, and confirm picks without paper manifests.
Effect on the workBarcode and WMS adoption enabled much larger stores and more complex assortments which required more total stocking labor even as per-item labor was reduced. Net employment grew substantially through this era.
Amazon Prime (2005) + e-commerce scaling: the order-picker specialization
Amazon launched Prime in February 2005, offering free two-day shipping on millions of items for an annual fee. The promise was operational: to deliver in two days, Amazon needed to fulfill orders the same day they were placed. That required fulfillment centers located near major population centers, stocked with high-velocity items at all times, with workers (called "pickers," "packers," and "stowers" in Amazon's internal terminology) who could locate and retrieve individual items quickly from vast shelved inventory. Amazon's fulfillment-center workers were doing what a grocery shelf stocker did, locating specific products and moving them to the right place at the right time, but at industrial velocity and with productivity metered to the second by warehouse management systems. The split between "retail stocker" (filling shelves in a store) and "fulfillment center order filler" (picking individual items for shipment) sharpened during this period, and both populations grew rapidly. US e-commerce sales grew from approximately $87B in 2005 to $168B in 2010, creating a parallel and rapidly expanding demand for fulfillment-center order fillers alongside the established retail stocker workforce.
Effect on the workThe Prime era created a new sub-specialization of the occupation (e-commerce order filling) that added to, rather than displaced, the retail stocking population. Employment grew on both dimensions through 2005-2012.
Amazon Kiva acquisition (2012) + Walmart Bossa Nova pilot (2017-2020): warehouse robotics enters
On March 19, 2012, Amazon announced the acquisition of Kiva Systems for $775 million. Kiva's autonomous mobile robots (orange drive units that navigate warehouse floors using QR codes, carrying wheeled inventory shelving pods to stationary human workers) eliminated the walking component of order picking and were the first scaled deployment of warehouse robotics aimed squarely at the tasks that define SOC 53-7065. Amazon deployed the first Kiva (rebranded Amazon Robotics) systems in 2013-2014. By 2019 it had deployed hundreds of thousands of robots. The "goods-to-person" model meant stationary workers received pods and picked items rather than walking miles of warehouse aisles, increasing pick rates substantially but not eliminating the human worker. In 2017, Walmart began piloting Bossa Nova Robotics's shelf-scanning robots in hundreds of stores. These autonomous robots patrolled store aisles using computer vision to identify out-of-stock shelves, misplaced products, and incorrect price labels: tasks that stockers traditionally performed manually through regular aisle walks. In November 2020, Walmart terminated the Bossa Nova contract, concluding that human workers equipped with handheld devices performed these aisle-audit tasks more flexibly and cost-effectively, particularly in the complex and ambiguous environment of a live retail store with customers present. The Bossa Nova termination became a frequently cited example of a well-funded robotics pilot failing against a cost-effective human solution. Kroger announced an exclusive US partnership with Ocado Group in May 2018 to build automated Customer Fulfillment Centers (CFCs) using Ocado's grid-based robotic picking system: a dense 3D storage grid where robotic "bots" retrieve storage containers while human workers handle final packing and exceptions. The first Kroger-Ocado CFC opened in Monroe, Ohio in 2021.
Effect on the workThe Walmart Bossa Nova termination in retail is the canonical counter-example to automatic displacement: human workers proved more flexible in ambiguous physical environments.
COVID surge + Amazon Sparrow / Sequoia: AI picking systems enter
US COVID-19 lockdowns in March 2020 created the largest single-quarter e-commerce demand surge ever recorded: Q2 2020 e-commerce sales grew 44.5% year-over-year (US Census Bureau). Amazon hired more than a hundred thousand workers in spring 2020 alone. Grocery delivery and curbside pickup (previously a niche service) became mainstream nearly overnight; Target, Walmart, Kroger, and Instacart all reported massive order-filling demand. The entire occupational category shifted from a moderate-growth trajectory to a brief but intense labor-market shortage: the same moment robots were supposedly eliminating the role. Employment hit historical highs during 2020-2022. In 2022-2023, Amazon deployed Sparrow, an AI-vision robotic arm capable of identifying and grasping individual packaged goods from mixed bins: the first broad deployment of a robot that could do a meaningful fraction of actual item picking (as opposed to pod transport). Amazon simultaneously introduced Sequoia (2023), a system for automated tote induction. Symbotic, which went public at a $5.5B valuation in 2022, deployed autonomous case-handling systems in Walmart distribution centers, capable of high-speed processing of uniform-sized cases in controlled warehouse environments. These systems addressed the fulfillment-center picking task more directly than Kiva's pod-transport model, bringing AI-vision robotics to the last mile of automation within the warehouse.
Effect on the workCOVID demand surge drove employment to historical highs in 2020-2022. The Sparrow and Sequoia systems have captured meaningful portions of Amazon's fulfillment-center picking volume, but SKU diversity and the dexterity challenge of irregular items continue to require human workers at the picking station.
AI-vision piece-picking + Symbotic at scale + BLS +8.5% projection to 2034
By 2023, the warehouse robotics industry had moved from pod-transport (Amazon Robotics AMRs) and shelf-scanning (Bossa Nova, terminated) to active piece-picking: systems like Amazon Sparrow, Mujin, Berkshire Grey, AutoStore, and Covariant's AI-vision picking arms can grasp and process an increasing share of the SKU universe. The dexterity challenge (picking irregularly shaped, soft, extremely light, or fragile items at acceptable speed and error rates) remains unsolved for a sizeable share of e-commerce SKUs as of 2026. The retail floor environment (live customers, inconsistent lighting, product displacement by shoppers) is significantly harder than a controlled warehouse for robotics. BLS projects +8.5% growth for SOC 53-7065 over 2024-2034, reflecting the continued dominance of e-commerce demand growth over automation productivity gains in the near term. The retail dimension of the occupation (Walmart hundreds of thousands of stockers, grocery chains broadly) is evolving differently from the fulfillment-center dimension. Retail floor stocking is being partially transformed by electronic shelf labels (ESLs), which automate price and promotions display but do not eliminate the physical task of moving product from backroom to shelf. Micro-fulfillment centers embedded inside retail stores (common at Kroger-Ocado and some Walmart formats) blur the boundary between the retail stocker and the warehouse order filler, increasingly requiring workers to do both functions.
Effect on the workBLS projects net employment growth of 8.5% over 2024-2034, driven by continued e-commerce expansion. Annual job openings are projected to be substantial: the occupation has high turnover from physically demanding conditions and part-time scheduling in retail. The projected net new jobs (235,000) exceed the BLS all-occupation average growth rate for this projection cycle.
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Browse all rolesStockers and Order Fillers employment and pay by year
In other countries
The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.
Canada (NOC 65102)
- Employment, 2020
- 225,115, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 65102 Store shelf stockers, clerks and order fillers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
- Median pay, 2020
- C$34,800, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 65102 Store shelf stockers, clerks and order fillers, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
United Kingdom (UK SOC 9252)
- Employment, 2025
- 463,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in Shelf fillers and warehouse/storage operatives, United Kingdom, 2025, taken as the sum of the cited cells for SOC 9241 + 9252 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Median pay, 2025
- £26,574, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for the dominant constituent group, SOC 9252, within the combined Shelf fillers and warehouse/storage operatives (SOC 9241 + 9252), United Kingdom, 2025. Wages are the cited median of the largest constituent group, not a blend. Open Government Licence v3.0.
Australia (ANZSCO 7411)
- Employment, 2025
- 163,400, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 7411 Storepersons, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
- Median pay, 2025
- A$69,056, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,328 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 16 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1890 | 80,000 | n/a | Est., IPUMS USA Researched context | Report |
| 1920 | 200,000 | n/a | Est., A&P Company history Researched context | Report |
| 1950 | 500,000 | n/a | Est., US Bureau of the Census Researched context | Report |
| 1970 | n/a | $4,200 | Est., BLS Historical Wage Data Researched context | Report |
| 1974 | 850,000 | n/a | Est., Smithsonian National Museum of American… Researched context | Report |
| 1990 | 1,500,000 | $11,500 | Est., Walmart Corporate History (employment) Researched contextEst., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 2000 | 2,000,000 | n/a | Est., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook Researched context | Report |
| 2010 | n/a | $21,200 | Est., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook Researched context | Report |
| 2012 | 2,300,000 | n/a | Est., BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook Researched context | Report |
| 2019 | 2,135,850 | $27,380 | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 2,210,960 | $29,190 | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 2,451,430 | $30,110 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 2,842,060 | $34,220 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 2,872,680 | $36,390 | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 2,779,530 | $37,090 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 2,833,810 | $37,330 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |