US retailers hired fewer than 500,000 seasonal workers last year. That is the lowest figure since 2009, and Challenger's year-end report recorded something that had never happened in fourteen years of tracking: zero new seasonal positions announced in November or December.
Now put that against the demand side. The Council on Criminal Justice found reported shoplifting in November and December runs consistently above the January-to-October average across 23 cities — 14% above in 2023, the widest gap in its series.
Peak is the one stretch of the retail year where exposure rises and coverage falls at the same time. That has always been true. What changed is how far apart the two lines have moved.
This edition is about that gap, what is actually documented about it, and why you will not find out what it cost until spring.
The exposure concentrates. The coverage does not.
The numbers on both sides are hard and they point in opposite directions.
Seasonal hiring is at a fifteen-year low. Challenger, Gray & Christmas recorded under 500,000 retail seasonal hires for 2025, against 672,300 in 2019 and 736,300 in 2020. Q4 2025 announced seasonal plans across all industries came to 372,520 — the lowest since tracking began.
The workforce is built and dismantled inside 120 days. BLS puts the October-to-December retail buildup at roughly 494,000 people, with 464,000 laid off across January and February. Whatever those people learn, they take with them.
Returns get materially worse in the holiday window. NRF and Appriss measured holiday return fraud at 16.5% of returned merchandise value against 13.7% year-round. That is a 20% relative deterioration in the one control that runs hottest in January.
Sales volume keeps climbing. NRF put 2025 holiday sales above $1 trillion for the first time. More transactions, more returns, more receiving, fewer people.
None of this is contested. All of it is published by organizations with no product to sell you.
What the data does not say
This brief does not assert things it cannot source, so here is the claim I went looking for and could not stand up.
Every LP practitioner I know believes that controls get quietly relaxed at peak — exception review deferred, refund authorization loosened, receiving checks shortened, audits pushed to January. I could find no published evidence for it. Not from NRF, RILA, LPRC, ECR, the academic literature, or a single retailer disclosure.
The trade press documents the opposite. What retailers actually freeze at peak is new project implementation — a change freeze, not a control freeze. One AP executive, quoted in LP Magazine: "Around the holidays, we're not doing any work that's going to put any of our stores at risk by adding things."
So treat the suspension theory as an open question inside your own operation rather than an industry fact. If it is happening in your stores, you can prove it in an afternoon by pulling exception-review completion rates for November against September. Nobody has published that comparison. You can run it.
One more absence worth knowing: there is no published study anywhere comparing holiday-period shrink to the rest of the year. Any vendor chart claiming one is manufactured.
A perspective from the field
The uncomfortable thing about peak is that it is the only period where every variable moves against you at once, and it is also the period when nobody has the bandwidth to look. Volume up, tenure down, supervision stretched, and a returns window that arrives just as the temporary staff are being let go.
I have never worked in an operation that could tell me, with evidence, what December cost it. Not because anyone was hiding it — because the instrument runs twice a year and December sits in the middle of a six-month measurement window. We manage the highest-risk quarter of the year on faith and find out in the spring.
Why you find out in March
This is the part that turns a seasonal problem into a structural one.
ECR Retail Loss surveyed how retailers actually measure shrink. Most collect it twice a year. Most of the remainder collect it annually. Fewer than 14% gather shrink data monthly or more often. Not one respondent conducted a count when a store manager changed position.
Run that against the calendar. If your counts land in, say, June and January, then everything that happened between Black Friday and Christmas is averaged into a six-month number alongside a quiet spring. There is no arithmetic that pulls December back out.
The gap runs deeper than timing. ECR also found more than half of retailers measure DC losses while only a third track transport losses between facilities — so loss that occurs upstream during the heaviest freight weeks of the year gets attributed to stores, if it gets attributed at all.
And the most granular internal-theft dataset in the industry, Jack L. Hayes International's annual survey of more than 22,000 stores, has never published a monthly or quarterly cut. The seasonal question has not been asked, let alone answered.
Three practical moves for the next 90 days
Instrument the twelve weeks you cannot count. Pick three proxies you can read weekly through peak — refund-to-sales ratio by store, exception-review completion rate, receiving discrepancy rate. They are not shrink. They are the only signal you will have before spring, and they cost nothing but a report.
Test the suspension theory in your own operation. Pull exception-review completion and audit-closure rates for last November against last September. If they fell, you have found a control that quietly switches off under load, and you have the evidence to fund fixing it. If they held, you have retired a piece of folklore.
Set the returns standard in writing before the window opens. Holiday return fraud runs about three points above the annual rate, and the January desk is staffed by people hired in October. One page, one authorization threshold, one escalation path — agreed with CX now, not negotiated at the counter on December 27.
Closing note
Twelve weeks from now the busiest quarter of the retail year starts, staffed by the smallest seasonal workforce in fifteen years, measured by an instrument that reports twice annually.
None of that is a scandal. It is just the shape of the calendar, and the shape has been getting steeper for six years while the measurement stayed where it was.
If your organization does measure shrink monthly, or has run the November-versus-September control comparison, I want to see the method — that is rarer than it should be. Reply with anything you can share, anonymized always.
Forward this to one LP or AP leader who should be reading it.
— Gabriel
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