LBM employees are getting younger as employment in the industry grows, data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests.
BLS doesn’t give specific annual counts on the number of people at pro-oriented dealers, but it does report numbers for two groups: Building material and supplies dealers (which includes big-box stores and home centers) and lumber and other construction materials merchant wholesalers. And in both groups, the median age has fallen: to 41.7 in 2017 from 2016’s 42.1 for building material and supplies dealers, and to 43.2 from 44.5 for the wholesalers.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
For the building material and supplies dealers, higher employment counts appear to be one reason why. BLS estimated there were 60,000 more people on that group’s payroll in 2017 and than in 2016, a 5.8% increase.
The wholesaler group is much smaller–just 152,000 workers in 2017–and in this case the count is down 19,000 from the year before. But here the median age appears to have fallen because nearly one-third of the decrease involved people aged 65 and above. Their share of the entire workforce dropped to 5% from 8%. Meanwhile, the share of people aged 35 to 35 rose to 46% from 39%.
Fears about in the LBM community that the labor shortage and the widespread payroll cuts made during the Great Recession nearly wiped out a generation of future leaders and fostered an executive class that’s far more gray-haired than many would like. Indeed, 27% of the building material and supplies employees in 2017 were age 55 and above. That’s the highest share since at least 2011.
