The entire retail sector seems to be looking forward to a particularly bountiful holiday season, with more shoppers starting their shopping earlier in the season. We have also heard via a Salesforce study that Black Friday (and not Cyber Monday) is expected to be the biggest online shopping day in the U.S., although some studies have shown the opposite.
The first thought in a retailer’s mind for handling this abundance of activity is to hire more people and add more inventory. That’s what they’ve always done — hence the notion of the seasonal employee in retail. However, Birghtpearl’s study finds that both of these solutions can be costly in their own ways: Retailers hire an average of 98 full-time seasonal staff to manage busy shopping periods, while the top 50% hire approximately 190 holiday staff members.
