Retailers are heading into the 2026 holiday stretch with an awkward pair of numbers on the table. Deloitte expects holiday sales between $1.70 trillion and $1.71 trillion from November through January, a gain of 4% to 4.8%, while Challenger, Gray & Christmas projects retailers will add only about 450,000 seasonal workers in the fourth quarter, below the 461,500 added in 2025, which was already the smallest seasonal gain since 2008. More sales moving through fewer people is a workable equation on the sales floor for a few weeks, and it becomes a serious problem when the year-end physical inventory lands on the same stretched team in January.

Inventory counts tend to absorb that strain without much warning, since a count that runs long or finishes with gaps doesn’t look like a failure until the variance report arrives and the shrink number moves. The seven signs below point to a count that needs outside help, and they reflect conditions specific to this year’s labor market, this year’s loss data and the accelerating shift toward RFID.

1. Your Holiday Staffing Plan Leaves No Room for the Count

Challenger’s outlook found that only a handful of large retailers had published seasonal headcount targets by late September, and the firm read that silence as a sign retailers plan to lean on existing staff and on-demand labor pools in place of large hiring waves. Andy Challenger described recent hiring announcements as “smaller and more surgical” than the pre-pandemic pattern, with high prices and tariff concerns pushing retailers to scrutinize their current workforce first. A surgical staffing plan built for selling rarely includes a cushion for a wall-to-wall count, and borrowing that cushion from January schedules means pulling associates off the floor during returns season. Supplemental staff fill that gap without forcing a store to choose between counting and serving customers.

2. Sales Per Associate Are Climbing Faster Than Headcount

Put Deloitte’s forecast next to Challenger’s and the math points in one direction, with each associate carrying more holiday volume than a year ago. Deloitte also expects holiday e-commerce sales to grow 7.5% to 8.4%, reaching $316.1 billion to $318.9 billion, and many of those orders draw on store inventory for pickup, ship-from-store and same-day fulfillment. Every one of those promises relies on an on-hand number that matches the shelf. When the team responsible for keeping that number accurate is the same team picking online orders and running registers, the count becomes the first task to get squeezed, and the errors it leaves behind carry straight into next quarter’s replenishment decisions.

3. Your Shrink Report Is Mostly a Counting Problem

Appriss Retail’s 2026 Total Retail Loss Benchmark Report estimated U.S. shrink at $90 billion for 2025 and classified 73% of it as preventable. Theft gets the headlines, though the same report attributed $19 billion to inventory errors and another $12 billion to operational errors, which puts more than a third of total shrink in the category of process mistakes that a better count can expose or prevent.

That distinction matters for anyone signing off on a year-end number. A count completed by a short-staffed, rushed crew produces skipped fixtures, double scans and mis-keyed quantities, and every one of those errors shows up as phantom shrink or phantom inventory. Supplemental staff who arrive pre-qualified and trained in-store before the count begins reduce those errors at the source, and Datascan’s Enhanced Data Analytics scorecards make it easier to see which stores and departments are generating variance worth investigating.

4. Shoppers Keep Finding Empty Shelves Your System Says Are Full

Sogolytics surveyed 951 U.S. shoppers in August 2026 and found that 28% ran into a product problem on their most recent store visit, including out-of-stock items, the wrong size or color or merchandise they couldn’t find, which was double the 14% who reported an issue with an employee. The same study found that a single issue raised the share of negative visits from 20% to 48%. Phantom inventory drives much of that friction, since a system that believes product is on hand won’t trigger a reorder. Datascan’s VP of Technology Strategy Herb Billings has noted that retailers counting with barcodes once or twice a year average roughly 35% inventory record accuracy before the count, which makes the annual count the main correction point for a year of drift, and a count that runs short on people corrects less of it.

5. Your RFID Rollout Needs More Hands Than Your Stores Have

RFID has moved well past the pilot stage in apparel and general merchandise. A study led by Professor Adrian Beck of the University of Leicester for GS1 UK and the ECR Community examined ten retailers and brands using RFID and found inventory accuracy of 93% to 99%, a sales uplift of 1.5% to 5.5% and a positive return on investment for all ten. RFID Journal analysis puts item-level store accuracy without RFID at 55% to 80% and estimates adoption among the world’s apparel stores at under 10%, which leaves most retailers still facing the initial lift.

That lift is labor-intensive. Tagging existing inventory, establishing a baseline count, validating read rates and running saturation audits all happen before RFID starts saving time, and those tasks land on top of normal operations. Supplemental staff can absorb the tagging and baseline work while Datascan’s RFID implementation team provides the tags, handheld readers and software, with leasing and rental options that let a retailer start without buying equipment outright. Once the baseline is set, Billings has said RFID counts can run up to 40 times faster than barcode counts, which changes the staffing math for every count afterward.

6. Repricing and Resets Are Competing With the Count

Tariffs and elevated prices are shaping retail decisions well beyond hiring, and Challenger cited both as reasons retailers are cautious about headcount this season. Price changes ripple through a store as relabeled shelves, updated signage, markdowns and resets, all of which compete for the same labor hours as inventory. Datascan’s supplemental labor covers special projects including shelving resets, product and shelf labeling and pallet moves, and its full-service package handles markdowns, price lookups, transfers and carton audits alongside the count, so a store doesn’t have to finish one project before starting the next.

7. The People Counting Are Newer Than the Merchandise

Seasonal hiring doesn’t always end in January. Michaels said almost half of its in-store seasonal positions from last year converted to regular roles, which is good news for retention and also means many associates on a winter count may be facing their first full physical inventory. An inexperienced counter misses fixtures, miscounts case packs and second-guesses unfamiliar SKUs, and those mistakes compound across a large store. Datascan’s supplemental staff are pre-qualified and vetted before they arrive, and each person receives in-store pre-inventory training, so the experience level of the counting crew doesn’t depend on who happened to be hired in October.

Choosing Between Supplemental Staff and Full-Service Counting

The right level of help depends on how much of the count a store wants to keep in-house. A hybrid count keeps the retailer in control of the process and adds supplemental staff to speed it up, which suits retailers with strong count procedures and a temporary labor shortfall. A full-service inventory count hands the entire event to Datascan, including staffing, training, scanners, RFID equipment, software and post-count analytics, which fits retailers juggling an RFID rollout, multiple locations or a leadership team that can’t spare a week of management attention in January.

Both paths end with the same goal, which is a count that finance can trust and a store team that gets back to customers quickly. Datascan is SOC 1 compliant, which matters to auditors reviewing year-end inventory controls, and a dedicated Customer Success Manager supports each count from planning through results. Retailers who recognized two or three of these signs in their own stores this fall still have time to plan a better January count, provided they start the conversation before the holiday rush fills the calendar.