Most retail managers build their schedules the same way they did last year – some rough estimates mixed with whatever felt right the last time around. This seems harmless enough. What your gut tells you and what actually happens on the floor don’t usually line up though, and when they don’t, the costs pile up fast. Every time that you’re either overstaffed or understaffed, it means you lose money and burn out your team at the same time.
Match your staff schedule with when the customers actually come in, and it will make just about everything better. Wait times drop, your team won’t be overwhelmed during the busy periods or stand around when it’s slow, and you’ll get a lot more value from every labor dollar that you spend. Even better, this doesn’t need any expensive new software or a big overhaul of your operations. All it takes is some great data about when your customers walk through the door!
Let’s talk about how to match your staffing levels with your busiest shopping times!
How Foot Traffic Has Changed Since 2020
Customer shopping habits have changed quite a bit since the pandemic and you can see it in weekend store traffic. Weekends bring in about 40% more customers than weekdays do, and that’s a much bigger gap compared to what we saw before 2020. Before the pandemic, many more customers would stop by during their lunch breaks or come in after work on a weekday, so the weekday-to-weekend split was way smaller back then.
The busiest shopping hours have changed quite a bit too. Just a few years back, most retail locations would get hit with their biggest crowds between 2pm and 4pm. Now though, that afternoon rush has been pushed back by a few hours. The busiest period tends to kick in around 4pm now and runs straight through 7pm or so.
What this actually means for your store is pretty obvious – you’ll have to have staff on the clock during different hours than you did just a few years ago. The odds are that you don’t have enough staff on hand when most of your customers are actually coming through if you’re still running the same schedule from 2019. Seasonal rushes are growing bigger and a lot more intense every year. During the holiday shopping season, you might need anywhere from 25% to 50% more staff than you would during a normal week, and that’s a much bigger spike than it was even just a few years back. Customers pack their shopping into just a few days now instead of spreading it out over a few weeks like they used to.
A quick comparison between your schedule and these patterns could show you something interesting. Many stores end up overstaffed during hours when foot traffic is pretty light. Schedules that don’t match up with shopping patterns create some frustration on each side – for your team and for your customers.
Find Your Store’s Busiest Hours
Once you have your data, the next step is to look at when those rushes happen. Everything you need is already there in the numbers, and the way to make sense of it all is to break it down layer by layer.
The point-of-sale system is probably the best place to start if you want to see when you’re actually the busiest. Most modern POS systems will track each transaction and stamp it with a time, which means you can pull up those reports and sort through everything by the hour. Do that and you’ll be able to see when the customers are coming through your door the most. For plenty of businesses, the rush happens between 11 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon (the lunch crowd). But you might also see it get busy again around 6 o’clock when everyone gets off of work.
Hourly patterns will give you useful information. But they’re only half of what you’ll have to know. The day of the week matters just as much. A Tuesday could be dead while Saturdays bring in twice the customers. Every business is a little different too. Plenty of stores get their busiest during weekday lunch breaks. Others make the most of their money from weekend shoppers who actually have the time to browse.
Seasonal patterns are just as worth keeping track of. A clothing store will see wildly different numbers in December compared to March. Back-to-school season has its own patterns, and so do summer vacation periods. Once all three of these time frames get examined together, the rhythm of your business finally starts to make sense.
Most retailers can work out their rush windows pretty easily once they actually take the time to sit down with the numbers. Usually it takes an hour or two to pull the reports and see when most of your customers are walking through the door. Foot traffic counters are nice to have if you’ve already got them installed at your location. But you can also just talk to your staff about when they feel the most swamped during a normal week. They can most likely tell you right when it gets busy.
Your best bet is to collect enough information to make sound decisions without going overboard with it. Plenty of detail is important. But at some point, more data just turns into noise. You don’t need to break down every minute of every day – it’s not a dissertation after all. The patterns that matter the most are the ones that show up reliably from week to week. Find those recurring patterns and you’ll know which time windows are going to need the most staff coverage.
Schedule Staff Around the Busy Times
The whole idea is to match up your staffing levels with when customers actually come in the door. If noon to 3 on weekdays is your busiest time, well then that’s the window where you need your best staff on the floor with enough bodies to take care of the rush. Your morning and evening periods are usually much quieter so you can run a smaller crew during those hours and you’ll be just fine.
Split scheduling lets you cover the lunch rush and an evening surge without paying a person to just stand around during that dead zone in the afternoon. An employee might work from 11 to 2, go home for a break and then come back from 5 to 8. This can be a great way to manage your labor costs and keep your team busy at the times you actually need them. But pulling it off takes some planning.
Split scheduling won’t work for everyone though – some employees love to have a few hours off in the middle of their day and others just can’t stand it. The commute distance plays a part in this and childcare arrangements do as well – not everyone can realistically make two trips to work in one day. Have an honest conversation with your team before you commit to a split schedule.
On-call scheduling is another way to add some flexibility if you need it. With it, you’ll have a small group of employees available to come in if your foot traffic ends up being way higher compared to what you had planned for. It works well as long as you can give them enough warning ahead of time and pay them fairly for being on standby. Nobody wants to sit around all day and wait to find out if they’re needed without being paid for that time.
Staff Handle Multiple Roles During Rush Times
When your cashier knows how to take care of the fitting room and can restock shelves when needed, they can step in wherever you need them right then. That flexibility is a big deal for any retail business, and it means you can get through your busiest hours without having to hire more staff or add more labor costs.
Every retail location deals with this scheduling headache at least once or twice during any given week. The checkout line might stretch halfway across the store, and at the same time the sales floor sits empty. On other days, the fitting rooms are packed full but not a single customer waits at the registers. Cross-trained employees can move between different areas depending on where the action actually is. This flexibility means you’re not paying workers to stand around in one location when the activity is happening somewhere else.
It gives you a lot more flexibility when the store gets busy and foot traffic starts picking up. You’re able to adjust to what’s actually going on right then. Say that Tuesday afternoons always bring a big wave of returns – well, you can just pull a team member from the stockroom and have them cover the customer service desk for an hour or two.
Another benefit that’s just as helpful is what cross-training does for employee morale. Team members feel a lot more valued when they’re able to learn new skills and take on different types of responsibilities around the store. Trusting them with multiple parts of your business lets them know that you see their abilities and want them to grow with you. Cross-training also breaks up the repetitive cycle of doing the exact same job for hours on end.
The best way to get started is to start small and let your team build their skills bit by bit. Cross-training everyone on everything at once just isn’t realistic for most teams. What makes more sense is to match up jobs that already have some of the same customer service basics. Train a greeter on how to process returns and exchanges. Or get a stocker comfortable with answering product questions. Either option gives you more flexibility with your schedule and neither one takes weeks of training time or pulls staff away from their normal duties for very long.
Cut Your Checkout Lines Without More Staff
There’s only so much staff can do when the line is wrapped around the building – the right technology and better processes can take on a big chunk of that burden for them.
Mobile checkout tools are becoming more popular with retail businesses because they let your staff ring up purchases from anywhere on the sales floor. When it gets busy, this capability alone can cut your wait times in half (sometimes even more!). Self-service kiosks are similar – they give your customers a different way to check out on their own, which means your employees can spend their time on other tasks. Most stores that use these tools together can cut their total staffing needs by around 15% to 20%, and the checkout stays just as fast and personal.
Plenty of customers will walk right out the door if they see a line that looks too long – it’s just human nature. Appointment-based shopping gives you an easy way to manage those peak hours without too much pressure on your staff. It helps spread out the foot traffic throughout the day, which means each customer gets more personalized attention from your team. Another benefit is that it cuts out the scramble to schedule extra workers at the last minute when it gets unexpectedly busy.
Mobile checkouts and kiosks aren’t meant to replace your team members. What they actually do is free up your best employees so they can work on the parts of the job where they help the most. If a team member stands behind a register for 6 hours straight, they can’t do much else. But that same person can help customers find the right products and answer questions on the sales floor. It’s a much better way to use their time and expertise.
Mobile checkout stations and self-service kiosks can help to bring down the stress at the register during peak times. These strategies work well on their own. But they work even better if you use them together. With the right combination in place, you’ll get through your busiest days and your team won’t be exhausted and the sales won’t walk right out the door.
Convert Your Foot Traffic Into Extra Revenue
You don’t need a massive investment to improve your team’s schedule and start to see results. The best strategy is that you take the time to work out when your store actually gets busy and then you adjust your hours to match up with those peak times. And when you have your scheduling lined up with customer traffic, plenty of other problems start to solve themselves. Cross-training helps a ton here – you can adapt fast when the pace picks up. Your team can switch between different roles when rush periods hit. Another area that’s worth paying attention to is your checkout process – if you can get rid of bottlenecks, you’ll stop losing customers to long lines before they make it to the register.
A few minor adjustments to the schedule can make a large difference and this usually happens within just a couple of weeks. Staff members won’t feel as stressed out when rush times hit and they won’t be standing around bored during the slow hours either, which does plenty to keep everyone in a better mood. Customers will get a much better experience too, mainly because you’ll actually have enough staff on the floor to help them when assistance is needed. Payroll dollars go a lot farther as well when employees are positioned based on demand.
Busy periods and heavy foot traffic are great. But ecoATM gives retail locations a way to turn those customers into extra revenue. Our kiosks let shoppers trade in their old phones and devices right as they shop in your store. It’s quick and convenient for them and it creates another income stream for your business. Our network has processed millions of devices over the years and it generates thousands of customer interactions every day. The best part about the program is working with businesses that want to get more value out of the traffic they already have. If a new revenue source sounds appealing to you (especially one that helps the environment too), let’s talk about how an ecoATM kiosk would work in your space.
