It’s a big week for labor market data. Tomorrow, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, comes out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Then, government shutdown notwithstanding, the all-important jobs report is supposed to come out on Friday.

This comes as we head into the final quarter of the year, when stores typically staff up for the busy holiday season.

People often wince at the thought of holiday shopping in September. But Ron Hetrick, an economist with the employment data firm Lightcast, said retailers have no choice but to plan for it.

“They have to make sure that all the inventory is in and aligned and everything's getting set up well in advance of the actual holidays,” Hetrick said.

And Hetrick said, even though some big retailers haven’t announced staffing plans yet, he thinks hiring will hold up OK, because consumer spending is holding up OK.

“Retail sales have been great,” Hetrick said. “I mean, they're not, they're not on a free fall and they're not even close. New orders have been very good. Shipments have held up very, very well.”

He said even though spending has been driven by wealthier consumers, “it’s still a market that has goods and it has people that are buying goods.”

Still, retailers — like the rest of us — are facing a lot of uncertainty, with tariff policy changing like the weather.

“Messaging is pretty mixed and we’re not sure where things are headed,” said Allison Shrivastava, an economist with Indeed. “That uncertainty makes it really hard to plan.”

So Shrivastava said retailers may wait longer than usual before posting those seasonal job openings.

“That's kind of the theme of 2025, is everybody just holding off for as long as they possibly can and making any kind of decision,” Shrivastava said.

Even if consumers do spend big this holiday season, Nitin Jain, managing director with AlixPartners, said that spending will be because things are getting more expensive.

“The growth that we are forecasting for the holiday is driven more by price inflation,” Jain said, and not by shoppers actually buying more stuff.

That could mean fewer jobs available than in years past.

“The hiring is directly proportionate to the number of units that they are expecting to sell,” Jain said. “And we think that the number of units is going to be historically low.“

Jain expects the trend of lower seasonal hiring to continue in future years, as retailers invest more in online sales and automation.