large casual talent pool does not guarantee operational capacity. Workers may be unavailable for key shifts, untrained, located too far from a store or distribution centre or unlikely to attend. Retailers can meet recruitment targets and still face unfilled rosters, delayed fulfilment and poor customer experiences. Looking beyond the headcount Gouel argued that peak-period staffing is now a workforce-planning challenge, not a recruitment challenge alone. Retailers already hold much of the data needed to anticipate pressure points, but often assess it in isolation or only once an issue has reached crisis point. “For retailers, prior-year sales are an important starting point to analyse to forecast staffing pressure in peak periods, but retailers also need to understand the operating conditions behind those sales,” Gouel said. Forecasts should consider sales, transactions, traffic and conversion by store, category, channel, day and time, alongside online orders, promotions, inventory receipts, delivery cut-offs, returns and local trading conditions. The latest ABS figures show household spending rose 6 per cent in the year to June 2026, while discretionary spending increased 6.7 per cent. Yet performance varied considerably across categories, making a single prior-year growth assumption less useful than category, channel and location-specific scenarios. The connected nature of peak trading means retailers cannot view shop-floor, online and fulfilment labour separately. Deloitte’s new Retail Report 2026 found 61 per cent of consumers regard physical stores as their top shopping channel, while more than half expect at least 20 per cent of holiday shopping to happen online. That places simultaneous pressure on stores, fulfilment operations and customer-service teams. “Attendance alone doesn’t tell you whether the workforce can handle the volume,” Gouel said. Tracking transactions per labour hour, units picked, orders packed and customer enquiries resolved can show whether a roster is genuinely sufficient, particularly where retailers depend on inexperienced seasonal hires. Spotting risk before the rush Workforce problems are often visible weeks before an urgent vacancy appears. A retailer may fill 97 per cent of shifts overall, but that result can mask risks across particular locations, roles and time windows. Gouel pointed to falling Friday-evening shift acceptance, rising late cancellations, repeated extra shifts among a small group of employees and longer travel distances for new workers. Together, he said, those signs indicate that “the retailer’s apparent capacity is becoming fragile”. TAG, which engages about 5,000 workers across more than 100 clients, is seeing greater candidate depth than during the most acute post-pandemic shortages. However, Gouel cautioned against equating applicant volume with capacity. SEEK reported applications per job advertisement reached a record high in June, while job advertisements were 6 per cent lower year on year in July. The ABS recorded an unemployment rate of 4.5 per cent in July, up marginally from the previous month. Gouel said candidates are placing a high value on predictable hours, clear start dates, convenient locations, efficient onboarding and confidence that promised work will materialise. Retailers that build large candidate pools but offer irregular or delayed shifts risk losing workers to employers that provide greater certainty. Building a workforce pressure map For multi-store retailers, Gouel recommends a forward-looking workforce pressure map instead of a single national recruitment target. It should translate expected demand into labour requirements by store, distribution point, role and trading window, then compare those needs with the workforce realistically available. TAG advises retailers that planning should begin 16 to 20 weeks before Black Friday, with recruitment and workforce activation underway 12 to 16 weeks out. In the final six weeks, forecasts should be updated using actual sales, inventory, order and workforce data. Deloitte found 75 per cent of retailers expect holiday sales growth, but just 52 per cent expect consumer confidence to improve in the coming year. Meanwhile, modern award minimum rates rose 4.75 per cent from 1 July, according to TAG. The figures raise the cost of inefficient deployment for retailers with high numbers of award-reliant employees. Recruitment remains important, but it is only one intervention. “Retailers can also adjust shift design, offer more predictable hours, cross-train existing employees, move labour between nearby sites, change the sequence of work or establish a trained reserve workforce,” Gouel said.