Associates are at the heart of holiday store experience, from ensuring smooth operations to helping shoppers feel the holiday spirit. This year, full-time retail workers will have to do all that with less support from temporary hires.
Retailers are expected to add 450,000 jobs in the fourth quarter of 2026, marking one of the smallest seasonal hiring sprees in nearly two decades, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Challenger, Gray and Christmas released in September.
Nikki Baird, VP of strategy and product at Aptos Retail, has mixed feelings about the reduced hiring levels. On one hand, retailers need people on the floor to support operations and keep up the holiday spirit. On the other hand, the role of associate is becoming more complex, which limits the role of inexperienced workers.
“I think that some of it reflects that the complexity of retail has grown to where you can't really just have bodies and have that be enough,” Baird told CX Dive.
The decline in seasonal hires reflects two facets of today’s retail landscape. Temporary associates are mainly suited for simple work like stocking — helpful, but not a replacement for a well-trained core workforce. Additionally, the state of the economy and ever-growing share of online sales may shift more sales online as well.
What will remain important, regardless of how retail changes, is that retailers have enough associates available to keep shelves full and checkout lines moving. When the basics feel ignored, the rest of the experience can quickly fall apart.
“If you’re doing whatever you can to get somebody to come to your store during the holidays, and you’ve improperly managed inventory to a point where people can't get what they want, or they can't get somebody to help them because there's not enough people, or the lines are so long it scares them away — that’s a huge mistake,” customer experience expert and author Shep Hyken told CX Dive.
Seasonal help has its limits
The role associates play in customer experience is changing, and it’s moving away from what seasonal workers can provide.
Seasonal staff have always focused on repetitive tasks, according to Sucharita Kodali, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. They can ring up standard transactions, restock inventory from the back room and handle other simple tasks.
“Temporary help is always more challenging,” Kodali said in an email. “It is throwing bodies against demand. These people may not be as familiar with policies, best practices or even the product assortment. Better experienced associates are always better for the customer experience.”
The more complex — and sometimes more important — tasks are better left to veteran associates, Baird said. “To be perfectly honest, with a lot of the things that retailers need store associates to be able to do, it's getting harder to throw seasonal help at that.”
For example, a retailer can turn a potentially negative customer experience into a positive one by offering special treatment, such as a discount, at the register. But keeping that transaction smooth requires someone already comfortable with the store and its systems.
“If you want to do complicated save-the-sale transactions in a store, you're not going to take somebody off the street and put a device in their hands and expect them to be able to guide a shopper through that and then execute that transaction without at least some help and training,” Baird said.
Hiring levels reflect changing store expectations
Retail hiring trends aren’t in line with holiday sales forecasts, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.
The National Retail Federation expects holiday sales to rise 4.2% year over year to about $1 trillion this year. However, that increase doesn’t necessarily correlate with a jump in the number of shoppers visiting stores.
Higher-income consumers will still come out in numbers, but higher gas prices and inflation will reduce the number of lower-income consumers shopping, according to Baird. With lower in-store traffic, fewer seasonal workers are needed to keep the store experience smooth.
Consumers shifting gift-buying online may justify reduced hires as well, according to Kodali.
Online holiday spending is expected to grow 6.7% year over year to $275.1 billion, according to research from Adobe. The five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday alone is expected to account for 17.3% of the total holiday season spend. This is up from $257.8 billion last year.
“Store transactions are down and that means hiring is following store activity,” Kodali said.
Technology, such as AI, can also reduce the number of associates necessary for smooth operations.
“There is more automation in stores, particularly with self checkout or online research, so in some cases the store associate is deployed to other tasks such as restocking shelves or assisting shoppers with exceptions,” Kodali said.
