Challenger, Gray & Christmas published its 2026 Holiday Hiring Outlook on Wednesday, September 23. The headline projection is 450,000 retail jobs added in the fourth quarter. That would land below last year's 461,500, which was already the smallest seasonal gain since 2008 and 15 percent under the 543,100 retailers added in Q4 2024.
Most coverage will stop at the retail number. Retail seasonal hiring is a proxy for store traffic. If you sell online and ship from a warehouse, it tells you very little about whether your orders leave the building on time in December.
The number that does tell you something sits further down the same report.
The warehouse line nobody quotes
Challenger's wording: "Seasonal hiring in Transportation and Warehousing followed a similar downward path. Employers in this sector added 266,500 positions in Q4 2025, down 12% from 2024 and the lowest Q4 total since 2018, when 259,500 jobs were added."
Read that with your own order volume in mind. The sector that picks, packs, sorts, and drives has cut its fourth-quarter hiring two years running. It is now 7,000 jobs above where it stood in 2018.
Order volume did not go back to 2018. Seasonal headcount nearly did.
This is the same pattern the August payroll data showed, when warehousing and courier employment both shrank in the month buildings normally start staffing up. One month of payroll data is noise. A two-year trend plus a forecast is a plan.
The plan is automation, and it is already bolted down
Andy Challenger, quoted in the release: "Prices are still high, tariffs continue to work through supply chains, and Retailers are leaning on automation, existing associates, and on-demand pools before hiring net-new seasonal workers."
The report says the same thing about fulfillment operators directly. Ecommerce firms and logistics providers, it notes, continue to lean on automation, robotics, flexible scheduling, and year-round staff to meet swings in demand.
Translate that into an actual building. Automation is capital that was approved months ago. Whatever sortation and pick technology a warehouse has on September 25 is what it will have on Black Friday. Nothing new gets installed between now and then. "Flexible scheduling" means the current crew working longer days. "On-demand pools" means gig labor called in by the shift.
That mix does not flex the way a hired and trained seasonal crew flexes. Someone who started in October and has handled your SKUs for six weeks is faster and more accurate than a temp on their first morning in December. The gap shows up as mispicks, and mispicks show up as returns in January.
Almost nobody has committed yet
The 2026 announcements so far are thin. Spirit Halloween said it will hire 52,000 associates to staff 1,575 stores across the US and Canada, its largest seasonal push ever. Michaels announced plans on September 10 to hire more than 10,000 seasonal team members.
Amazon, UPS, FedEx, and USPS had not released 2026 headcount targets as of the September 23 report. Amazon typically announces in mid-October.
Those carrier numbers matter to you even though none of those people work for you. Carrier staffing sets sort capacity. Sort capacity decides whether a package that leaves the warehouse Tuesday afternoon moves Tuesday night or waits.
Four things to confirm before October 1
Ask your fulfillment partner now, while an answer can still change something.
What is your peak-day ceiling in orders? Not the average. The single busiest day the building can clear with the people and equipment currently committed. A partner who cannot give you a number has not modeled it.
What happens on the day you exceed it? The real answers are overtime, a second shift, a Saturday run, or orders rolling into the next day. Find out which, and in what order.
How much of your Q4 floor staff is year-round? A building running on permanent staff with a thin seasonal layer behaves nothing like one that doubles with temps in November.
When does seasonal training start? Two days of training before Cyber Week produces accurate picks. Same-morning onboarding produces mispicks.
What this means for your brand
A thin labor market rewards brands already sitting inside a building with stable staff. It punishes brands that go shopping for capacity in November. December capacity gets allocated in late September and October. That is this week and next.
Moby Dick runs ecommerce fulfillment out of Canal Winchester, Ohio with a year-round team rather than a November hiring spike. Orders are processed within 24 hours. From central Ohio, 90 percent of US customers are reached in two days by ground, which keeps packages off air services during the weeks air capacity is tightest and priciest.
Distance does the rest of the work. Sixty percent of the US and Canadian population sits within 600 miles of the building. Short zones mean fewer sort touches per package, and every sort a package skips is one fewer place a short-staffed hub can hold it.
If nobody has given you a peak-day ceiling in orders, ask for one. A partner who knows the number will say it out loud. A partner who does not know it plans to find out in December, using your orders.
FAQ
Does lower seasonal hiring mean my orders will ship late?
Not automatically. It means the buffer is thinner. A warehouse with stable year-round staff and a defined overflow plan can hold service levels through peak. A warehouse that budgeted for 200 temps and lands 120 cannot. The difference is worth asking about before your volume shows up.
Is it too late to switch 3PLs before the holidays?
It is late but not impossible, and it gets harder every week. Receiving, counting, and putting away inventory takes real time, and receiving docks fill up through October. Our guide to choosing a 3PL covers what to verify before you commit to anyone.