It is a Saturday in December, a little after four. One clerk is on the register with a line of six. The beer delivery is at the back door, the coffee station is empty, and the second person on the schedule called out at noon. A customer wants a refund on a carton of cigarettes. The refund needs a manager override. The only person in the building who can type the override code is the clerk ringing it up.
Nothing about that afternoon is unusual. That is the point. This holiday season, more stores will run more hours exactly like it.
Fewer hands this holiday, again
On September 23 of 2026 the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas published its holiday hiring outlook. Retailers added 461,500 jobs in the fourth quarter of 2025. That was the smallest seasonal gain since 2008, and 15 percent below the 543,100 jobs added in the fourth quarter of 2024. For this year, Challenger expects seasonal retail hiring to come in lower still, at about 450,000. In 2020 and 2021 the same number was above 900,000.
The reasons Challenger gives are familiar to anyone running a store. Prices are still high, tariffs are still working through supply chains, and retailers are leaning on automation, their existing associates, and on demand labor pools before they hire anyone new for the season.
This is not a one year blip. Last November the National Retail Federation forecast that retailers would bring on between 265,000 and 365,000 seasonal workers for the 2025 holidays, against 442,000 the year before, in the same release where it expected holiday sales to pass $1 trillion for the first time. More sales, fewer people to handle them.
For a large chain, "leaning on existing associates" is a staffing plan. For a single convenience store or a gas station with three or four employees, it means the same thing it always has: longer shifts, more solo coverage, and a newer person on the register during the busiest weeks of the year.
What thin coverage does to loss
Most conversations about holiday shrink start with shoplifting, and stretched staff do make a store an easier place to walk out of. But thin coverage changes something that gets less attention. It changes who is able to check whom.
Most register controls quietly assume two people. A void is supposed to be approved by someone else. A refund needs a manager. A no sale is supposed to be explained to the next person counting the drawer. A delivery is supposed to be checked in by someone who is not also running the line. When one person is alone in the building, every one of those controls is still on paper and none of them is actually happening. The clerk approves their own void because there is nobody else to do it, and the store has no way to tell an honest correction from a dishonest one.
Internal loss is not a small number either. The 35th annual retail theft survey from Jack L. Hayes International, covering 2022, found that participating retailers apprehended 44,834 dishonest employees, up 18 percent from the year before. The average case was $1,136.93 per dishonest employee, against $802.01 per shoplifter. Those figures come from large chains with loss prevention teams, so they are not a measure of any particular store. They do show the shape of the problem: when an employee takes, they tend to take more per case, and they do it through the same register everyone trusts.
None of this means seasonal or newer staff are dishonest. Most mistakes during a rush are just mistakes: a wrong key, a scan that did not register, a refund keyed to the wrong tender. That is part of the problem too. When honest errors and deliberate ones both land in the same void report at the end of the week, the owner either chases every line or chases none of them.
Where to look in December
You do not need new hardware to start paying attention to the right hours. A few patterns are worth checking on any point of sale system, with or without help.
- Solo hours. Pull the schedule and mark every hour with one person on. Compare voids, refunds, and no sales in those hours against hours with two or more on. A store where the solo hours look very different deserves a closer look.
- Overrides with no manager on the clock. If a manager code was used during an hour when no manager was scheduled, someone is sharing a code. That is worth fixing even if nothing was taken.
- The first thirty days. A new employee's error rate should fall week over week. If voids and refunds stay flat or climb after the first month, it is either a training gap or something else, and both are worth a conversation.
- Deliveries during a rush. A delivery checked in while one person is also running the register is a delivery nobody really counted.
- The drawer at shift change. If a drawer comes up short more often on shifts that ran solo, that is the pattern, not the person.
The difficulty is that each of those checks needs at least two systems at once. The point of sale knows what was rung and voided. The schedule knows who was on. The camera knows what actually happened at the counter. In most stores those three never meet, so the owner does the joining by hand, usually after the fact, usually only when a number is already badly wrong.
That joining is the work we built ARGUS to do. It reads the register, the schedule, and the cameras a store already owns, and it puts them on the same timeline. A void in a solo hour comes with the video of that moment and the name on the schedule. An override with no manager on the clock gets flagged the day it happens, not at the end of the quarter. The goal is not to watch staff more closely. It is to give a stretched owner a short list of moments worth two minutes of attention, instead of a long report nobody has time to read.
The holidays will be busy whether or not the staffing is there. A thinner team does not have to mean thinner oversight, as long as the checks that used to need a second person can be done another way.
If you are heading into the season short handed and want to compare notes, you can talk to us or write to business@useargus.co.