Target reported quarterly results before the bell on Wednesday morning, and sales were down 1.5%.

And, at this time of year, Target would usually announce tens of thousands of open seasonal positions in preparation for the holiday shopping season. That’s not the case this year, however, and Target’s not the only retailer holding back on temporary hiring. 

To make a big investment in a holiday workforce, retailers need a good sense of what holiday profits are going to look like. 

Right now, “there’s a lot of uncertainty in the industry,” said Mark Mathews, chief economist with the National Retail Federation. 

With the burden of tariffs, slipping consumer confidence, and more than a month without government data that usually guides these decisions, “all these things have left retailers a little bit uncertain about what to do,” he said.

So, they’re holding off. In November and December, the NRF projects retailers will hire fewer than 365,000 temporary workers. “That, for context, is the lowest figure that we’ve seen in the last 15 years,” Mathews said.

At the same time, NRF predicts that holiday sales will grow in 2025 to just over $1 trillion. 

So, retailers are either betting they can pull that off without reinforcements, “or they know something that the rest of us don’t,” said Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst with Forrester. 

Projected sales growth could reflect higher-than-normal inflation, rather than a higher volume of sales and traffic, she noted. “So even though retailers are making more money, they’re not necessarily making it from more people purchasing more products.”

And if in-store traffic does ramp up more than expected, retailers have levers to pull in this softening labor market, according to Alan Benson, a labor economist at the University of Minnesota.

“It’s kind of a buyer’s market,” he said. “They just have a lot of different solutions to fill in hours.”

Think things like automation, rosters of “on-call” workers like the one Target’s been investing in, or even squeezing more out of their permanent workforce. 

“People who are currently employed who are looking at the relatively poor job market and they’re thinking, ‘Well, if my retailer can give me more hours, then sign me up,’” Benson said.

If you’re a job seeker, this is not good news. Benson said the oldest and youngest workers will be hurt most by the slump in holiday hiring. 

And Sucharita Kodali at Forrester added that it will likely chip away at the quality of customer service: “Everything from products not being stocked on shelves as you need them to not having a person being able to answer your questions.”

All of which are telltale signs of retailers trying to do more with less this holiday season.