Dive Brief:

• The economy in May added 31,000 retail jobs, besting the average of 24,000 jobs each month over the past year, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Friday.

• Overall in May, unemployment edged up slightly to 5.5%, but experts attribute the slight uptick from 5.4% to the influx of new jobseekers entering the market. The economy added 280,000 jobs, the largest gain since December, easing concerns that the recovery was stalling.

• But economists said that wage stagnation remains a problem: Hourly wages rose 0.3%.

Dive Insight:

The recovery seems to be more or less intact, with last quarter’s stall likely due to severe winter weather, inventory issues at West Coast ports, and the strong dollar, which is hurting sales of American goods and services.

But the recovery also continues to leave many Americans behind, with wages stuck for lower-income workers. That will continue to be a problem for retailers looking to ditch promotional prices and boost sales.

“Even a slight increase in year-over-year wage growth would be new and something different,” Tara M. Sinclair, an associate professor of economics at George Washington University and an economist at Indeed.com, told The New York Times.