Last Year's Holiday Hiring Was the Smallest Since 2008. This Year Most Big Retailers Haven't Named a Number.
· CX Pulse
Retailers added the fewest holiday jobs since 2008 last year and most haven't named a number for this one. Customers are still coming.
Last Year's Holiday Hiring Was the Smallest Since 2008. This Year Most Big Retailers Haven't Named a Number.
Every September the big retailers announce how many seasonal workers they plan to bring on. This year most of them skipped it. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the outplacement firm that tracks these announcements, published its 2026 holiday hiring outlook on September 23 and followed it with its monthly report last Thursday. Together they describe a holiday season being staffed very differently from the ones customers remember.
By Challenger's analysis of federal jobs data, retailers added 461,500 jobs in the last quarter of 2025. That was the smallest seasonal gain since 2008 and 15% below the year before. The firm expects about 450,000 this year. In 2020 and 2021 the figure was above 900,000.
The announcements point the same way. Through September, Spirit Halloween and Michaels were the only retailers that had put out a seasonal number, 62,000 hires between them, against 100,800 announced by seasonal employers the previous September. Challenger notes that Amazon, Target, Kohl's and Bath & Body Works, which have a history of early targets, hadn't disclosed one when the outlook was published.
Shoppers haven't pulled back to match. Challenger's own read is that August retail sales rose 1.2% and "there's no sign of a major spending pullback." So about the same number of customers will show up, and about as few new people will be hired to meet them as in any season since 2008.
What covers the gap
Andy Challenger, the firm's chief revenue officer, names the replacements directly. Retailers are "leaning on automation, existing associates, and on-demand pools before hiring net-new seasonal workers." He says almost every hiring announcement of the last three years has been "smaller and more surgical than the pre-pandemic playbook."
Each of those three reaches the customer in its own way.
Existing associates means the people who already know the store work more of it. They're the best coverage a retailer has, and December asks them for the most hours in the weeks when the questions are hardest.
An on-demand pool means shifts filled through a flexible staffing arrangement, often by someone who may be in that building for the first time. They can stock a shelf and run a register on day one. Whether they can process a return without a receipt, honor a price from the app, or find an online order that was supposed to be ready an hour ago depends on what the system lets them do and what anyone had time to show them.
Automation takes the simple transactions, which leaves the staffed lanes and the service desk with the complicated ones.
The same thing is happening behind the store. Transportation and warehousing added 266,500 jobs last holiday quarter by Challenger's count, the lowest since 2018, and the firm expects a similar total this year.
One more detail from the outlook deserves attention. Michaels said nearly half of last year's seasonal in-store roles converted to regular positions. For a lot of retailers the holiday wave is how next year's trained staff gets found. A smaller wave this December means a smaller bench next spring.
If you run CX for a large operation
A surgical plan depends on the forecast being right by store and by hour, and it leaves very little room when the forecast misses. So the first thing to know is where your customers will find the misses before you do.
Look at what each kind of labor is permitted to do. If flex workers can't override a price, approve a return past the window or reissue a pickup order, every one of those requests queues for the same few regular associates, and the line the customer stands in is the line for a person with permissions.
Split the December service numbers by who was on the floor. Wait time, walkouts, returns processed per hour and complaint volume by store and hour, set against the share of that hour covered by regular staff, flex staff and self-service. Most reporting rolls these together, which hides exactly the hours this plan is betting on.
Check the contact center forecast too. When a store can't answer "where's my order" or "can I return this here," the customer calls or opens a chat. If that forecast was built on last year's store staffing, it's already light.
If you're a smaller operation
You never hired a seasonal wave. Your version of this is the same three or four people working more shifts, plus a relative or a part-timer who starts the week it gets busy.
The useful hour to spend now is on the questions that only you can answer today. A return past the window. A gift with no receipt. An item someone wants held until Friday. Holiday customers ask these more than anyone, and they ask whoever is standing closest. Decide the answer to each, write it where the newest person can find it, and say who's allowed to say yes when you aren't there.
A surgical staffing plan has no slack in it. December is when customers find out where the slack used to be.