Picture a home and gift store on a Thursday in mid-November. The weekend promotion went live overnight, and throws and candle sets are moving faster than planned. The truck due at six arrived at nine, leaving cartons in the back room that should be on the floor by lunch. The pickup queue is growing, with orders for promoted items still in those cartons. Up front, a shopper wants help choosing a gift, and the associate who knows that department best is about to unload the truck.
Nobody in that store is short on effort. On paper, they may not even be short on people. What changed is the work: how much of it there is, what kind, and when it all decided to arrive.
The rest of the season will put stores through that moment many times. Holiday isn't one peak. It's at least four: promotional November, the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, December gifting, and the returns and recovery weeks that follow. Each asks for different work from the same teams. "Enough people" is only a useful answer once you know which work you're counting.
Retailers are entering the season with higher sales expectations and a measured approach to hiring. The National Retail Federation forecasts that U.S. retail sales in November and December 2026 will grow 4.2% over 2025, to $1.013 trillion, and expects retailers to hire 325,000 to 375,000 seasonal workers, in line with last year. Challenger, Gray & Christmas observes that retailers are leaning on automation, existing associates and on-demand pools before hiring net-new seasonal workers. That makes understanding the work assigned to existing teams especially important.
November: Promotions Move the Work Around
Promotions rarely add demand evenly. A deal on small kitchen appliances pulls traffic into one department for one weekend. A sharper online price shifts orders toward pickup at the stores nearest the biggest neighborhoods. An early cold snap fills the outerwear aisles in one region while another stays quiet. In grocery, the Thanksgiving build starts weeks ahead, with baking, produce and center-store displays that need filling long before the holiday week itself.
Each of those changes is local: a location, a department, a day, an hour. And each becomes a work change. A promotion that beats expectations brings more cartons to receive, more shelf fills, more orders to pick and more questions on the floor, and it changes when all of that happens.
Some schedules for the next week or two may already be published. Teams can still refresh the assumptions behind upcoming plans while respecting commitments already made to associates. Compare actual traffic, transactions and online orders with what the plan expected, by store and daypart. Note where promotions, weather or local events moved demand, and treat pickup and delivery orders as demand drivers in their own right.
That is forecasting's job. Logile Forecasting continuously reforecasts as promotions, weather, holidays and customer behavior change, and forecasts workload down to the task and the 15-minute interval. A forecast is still a demand input, though. It only becomes a labor requirement once that demand is translated into work through labor standards and a labor model.
Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday: Several Peaks at Once
In 2026, Thanksgiving falls on November 26 and Cyber Monday on November 30, so the whole stretch lands inside November. In five days, stores run several different peaks on top of each other.
In general merchandise and specialty stores, Friday morning needs people at the doors, the registers and the promoted tables, while online orders placed Thursday night are already waiting to be picked. For retailers that fulfill from stores, Cyber Monday is a store event too. Target reported that its stores fulfilled 97.7% of total merchandise sales in the third quarter of 2025, including in-store purchases and digitally originated orders fulfilled through stores. During the 2025 holiday season, curbside pickup accounted for 17.1% of U.S. online orders at retailers that offer it, according to Adobe.
Grocery runs on a different curve. The heaviest days typically come before the holiday, and the weekend after is about recovery: refilling, resetting and rotating fresh product after the rush.
Receiving and replenishment keep their own clock: trucks timed for the event land while the floor is full, and shelves emptied by Saturday afternoon need recovery overnight. And the busiest floor hours are often when pickup customers arrive, so fulfillment and service need the same people in the same intervals.
December: Promises, Availability and the People Keeping Them
Gifting changes the work again. Shoppers ask more questions and take longer to decide. Pickup promises get tighter as shipping cutoffs pass, since for retailers that offer pickup, late orders that can no longer ship in time often come through the store. Availability gets harder to protect just as more customers count on it. This year the last Saturday before Christmas is December 19, and Christmas Day is a Friday, so the final push runs through four weekdays when many associates also have plans of their own. In grocery, the same days bring another holiday-meal build, with fresh departments preparing for a short, steep peak.
Seasonal associates who joined in November may know the register but not the pickup process or the service desk, and every hour spent training them comes from someone who would otherwise be covering. The most reliable people get asked to pick up one more shift, then another. By mid-December, many teams have been running hard since October. Fatigue is real, and so is the pride people take in getting customers what they came for.
This is why total headcount and weekly hours can look reassuring right up to the moment they aren't. A store can hit its weekly hours and still be short at the service desk on the Saturday before Christmas, because hours were placed by averages, or because the people available then aren't trained for that work. Counting the work means counting it by department, task and time of day.
That translation happens in steps. Labor standards and a labor model turn forecast demand into labor requirements for each department. Staff planning turns those requirements into how many people are needed, where and when, before anyone builds a schedule. Logile Staff Planning converts task-level labor demand into staffing requirements at 15-minute intervals by task grouping, and shows where coverage rules add or remove hours.
After the Gifting Peak: Returns, Markdowns and Recovery
The season doesn't end on December 25. It turns around. Ahead of the 2025 season, retailers told NRF and Happy Returns they expected 17% of holiday sales to be returned, according to the 2025 Retail Returns Landscape. Adobe, which tracks U.S. online shopping, found that returns from December 26 to 31, 2025 rose 4.7% from the year before, and one in seven of the season's returns happened in those six days. Plan beyond that first week: NRF identifies January as the main period for holiday returns.
Returns and exchanges need people who know the policy and can make judgment calls. Returned items need inspecting, then restocking or setting aside. Gift card shoppers arrive. Markdowns mean resets and price changes, a floor shopped hard for six weeks needs recovering, and the January reset is close behind. All of it lands as seasonal associates finish, on the team that carried December.
What the Work Costs When Assumptions Change
Every shift in the season shows up in the labor budget: overtime on Cyber Monday, extra hours for returns week, training hours for seasonal hires. Finance sees a weekly total; Operations sees a Thursday evening gap. Neither view is complete alone.
The more useful conversation asks what work each labor dollar supports, and what happens when an assumption moves: promotional lift runs higher than planned, a delivery schedule slips, or pickup volume outgrows the plan. Review budget versus actual alongside demand, task requirements, coverage and actual hours. Together, those views help teams investigate whether extra hours reflect higher demand, work arriving at a different time, training needs or other operating conditions. For testing those assumptions before they reach the store, see our earlier post, Holiday Is the Ultimate Test of Your Labor Plan.
Logile Budgeting builds store-specific labor budgets from forecasting, labor model and staffing inputs. Finance, HR and Operations can compare scenarios, reconcile top-down targets with bottom-up requirements, and track budget versus actual as the season moves.
A Checklist for Your Next Peak
Pick the next big weekend on your calendar and work through these with your store and labor planning leads:
· Refresh the forecast. Which promotions in the next two weeks are most likely to move traffic or online orders, in which stores, and has the forecast been updated for them?
· Find the shared intervals. Where will fulfillment and service need the same people at the same time? Name the stores, departments and hours.
· Count the work sales totals don't explain. Which receiving, reset, markdown and returns activities need coverage, and when will that work land?
· Check skills against peaks. Who is trained for pickup, the service desk and returns, and how many of them are available when those peaks hit?
· Read the overtime. Where has overtime appeared two weeks running? Compare actual demand, coverage, availability and task requirements with the plan, and share the findings with Finance.
· Plan post-Christmas coverage now. Who covers returns, markdown resets and replenishment from December 26 into January as seasonal associates leave, and how will permanent teams get time to recover?
Keep a record of what changes this season: forecast misses, repeated coverage adjustments, tasks that take longer than expected and skills gaps. Bring those observations into 2027 planning while the details are fresh. They can help teams revisit labor standards, staffing assumptions and budgets before the next peak.
Count the Work, Then the People
Each peak asks something different of the same people: chasing moving demand in November, covering overlapping needs over Thanksgiving weekend, keeping promises in December, and handling returns and recovery into January. Headcount alone cannot show those demands. Count the work by store, department and hour, a week or two before it lands, while there is still time to adjust people, hours or priorities. That gives teams a clearer plan for the next peak and a stronger foundation for the year ahead.
Holiday Labor Planning FAQs
Review when receiving and replenishment work can be completed before deciding whether to add hours. Confirm delivery volume, remaining processing time, trained associates and customer service commitments for the affected periods. Then decide which tasks can move and which need additional coverage, while protecting safety requirements. Treat the delay as a timing change unless the evidence also shows a change in the amount of work.
Count training as work for both the seasonal hire and the experienced associate providing instruction and support. Estimate how much regular work each person can complete during training instead of assuming both provide full independent coverage. Review those assumptions as new hires become proficient, and place training outside critical service peaks where practical. This makes the capacity available for customer service and fulfillment more realistic.
Treat unfinished pickup tasks as remaining work carried into the next interval, separately from newly arriving orders. Identify which steps are still required, when each order is due and which skills are needed. Avoid counting a partly completed order as an entirely new order. Compare the combined incoming and unfinished workload with available coverage before moving associates from checkout, service or replenishment.
Budget returns labor in the periods when returns are expected to be processed, rather than tying it only to the week of the original sale. Use prior return patterns, current return windows and the time needed for inspection, refund or exchange handling, and restocking. Review that workload alongside seasonal staffing departures and other January tasks. A lower sales forecast alone is not a sufficient reason to reduce returns coverage.
Look for recurring patterns and known operating changes before revising the baseline labor plan. Record the cause, affected tasks, timing, extra hours and service impact of each exception, then compare similar stores and periods. A single weather-related delivery delay may call for a temporary adjustment. Repeated support needs for a new fulfillment service may justify reviewing labor standards, staffing rules or budgets for 2027.
To see how forecasting, staff planning and budgeting connect, explore how demand becomes a labor plan your stores can execute.
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