Don't Buy Holiday Traffic for a Store That Can't Staff It. Fund Recruiting First.

If a location can't staff a busy Saturday, every dollar you spend sending it more customers this holiday season is wasted, and some of it does real damage. I'd make staffing a gate on local media. Before holiday spend goes live, rate every location on whether it can serve more traffic. At the stores that can't, hold new-customer acquisition and move part of that store's budget into local recruiting until it can.

I've spent my career in strategy across marketing, retail, and consulting, and the planning gap I'd fix first in most multi-location brands is that demand and capacity get decided in two different meetings. Marketing sets the calendar. Operations finds out in December. The guest who waits too long for an order doesn't care which meeting was at fault.

Why most marketers will reject this, and when they're right

The strongest objection is share. Holiday weeks are when customers form habits and buy gift cards, and a brand that goes dark at a store hands those weeks to the competitor down the road. Pull acquisition spend and you may never win those households back. I take that seriously.

It's also correct in some cases. If a national promotion is running on TV or in your app, every store has to honor it, and cutting local spend won't stop the traffic. If the shortage sits in a role guests never see, like an overnight prep shift, the guest experience may hold up fine. And a store opening in a new market usually needs awareness more than flawless service in week one, so I'd keep spending there and staff ahead of it.

Outside those cases, I keep coming back to a simple point. Paid media can't fix a slow line. It only makes the line longer.

Hiring got easier, just not at every store

The national labor picture has changed a lot. The National Restaurant Association reported in April that only 22% of operators said their restaurants lacked enough staff to meet customer demand in 2025, down from 32% in 2024 and well below the 78% who said so in 2021. Government data points the same way. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 713,000 job openings in accommodation and food services in August 2026, a preliminary figure, compared with 942,000 a year earlier.

Retail is hiring carefully too. The National Retail Federation expects retailers to add between 325,000 and 375,000 seasonal workers this holiday, in line with last year's estimated 356,000, and calls it a measured approach.

So why write about staffing at all? Because the shortage that's left is concentrated. In the same Association report, nearly 79% of operators who were short-staffed said it significantly limited their ability to grow, and 47% of operators still had job openings that were hard to fill. A national average that looks healthy can hide the 10 or 20 stores in your system running a crew short every weekend. It's the same problem we see in blended sales reports. Location-level marketing needs location-level measurement, and staffing belongs in that measurement.

We've run recruiting like a media buy

Recruiting usually lives in HR with a job board budget. I'd treat it as local marketing, because the targeting problem is identical. You're trying to reach the right people within driving distance of one specific store, and the tools are the ones we already use for customers, from geofencing to email.

A muffler and auto repair company asked us to find qualified candidates with digital ads. We ran a six-month recruitment campaign aimed at mobile devices found at auto repair shops within a 15-mile radius of the client's locations, filtered for high-frequency events so the ads reached people who most likely worked there rather than customers. Month 1 produced 13 online applications. Month 5 produced 36 online applications, 6 resume submissions, and 118 career page visits.

A fast-casual bakery restaurant company with over 2,000 locations needed staff as its dining rooms reopened, so we built an email recruitment campaign aimed at people living near each restaurant that needed employees. It drew an open rate over 20%, against a typical 15%, and a click rate over 2%, roughly in line with the typical 2%. The design is what I'd copy. Messages went only to the trade areas of restaurants that needed people, which is how I'd want a brand to think about holiday recruiting.

The bench test

You can run this in a week with data you already have, and you don't need to buy anything.

1. List every location with its planned holiday media by week, and separate new-customer acquisition from loyalty and retention spend.
2. Pull four weeks of staffing data by store. Scheduled hours against the hours your labor model calls for is ideal. If you don't have that, open positions by role and the number of shifts each store ran short will do.
3. Pull three warning signs for the same weeks, namely early closings or reduced hours, slower order or service times, and reviews that mention waiting.
4. Ask each general manager or franchise owner one question. If traffic rose 20% next Saturday, could you serve it well? Record yes, maybe, or no.
5. Rate each store green, yellow, or red using the rule below, and put the rating next to its media plan.

Here's the decision rule I'd use.

• Green means fully staffed, no warning signs, and a manager who says yes. Run the full plan.
• Yellow means one open role or one warning sign. Run the plan, but skip offers built to spike traffic on a single day and spread them across the week instead.
• Red means a missing manager or cook, two or more warning signs, or a manager who says no. Hold new-customer acquisition at that store, keep loyalty and retention running, and move a quarter of its planned local media into recruiting aimed at its own trade area. Re-rate it every week and restore the full plan once it rates green two weeks in a row.

The quarter is my judgment. Use whatever share your system can track cleanly. What counts is that the money stays with the store that needs help and comes back when the store is ready. Sometimes the right advice is not to spend, and a red rating gives you a fair, written reason to say so to a franchisee who would rather keep the ads running.

Three things this test won't tell you

First, the ratings are rough. A manager's yes is a judgment call, and four weeks of schedules can miss a store that's about to lose its best cook. Second, our own recruiting evidence measures applications, visits, opens, and clicks. Neither case study tracked how many applicants were hired or stayed, and both are several years old, so treat them as evidence the targeting reaches candidates. They don't show hires. Third, the national data has edges. The Association's figures cover restaurants, the BLS figure combines restaurants with lodging and will be revised, and NRF's forecast covers retail and leaves restaurants out.

I also can't prove from this test that a held dollar would have hurt the store. You'd need to compare red stores that kept spending with red stores that paused, and most brands won't have enough of them in one season. Where clients opt in, our closed-loop attribution follows marketing through to revenue by location, which makes that comparison possible next year. Where they don't, we say plainly where the evidence stops.

One question for every general manager

Before Friday, send step four to your general managers and franchise owners. If traffic rose 20% next Saturday, could you serve it well? The stores that say no are where your holiday plan should change first.

Sources

• National Restaurant Association, "Research Insight: Hiring & Staffing. How Onboarding, Managers, & Technology Drive Restaurant ROI," April 2026.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, August 2026," September 29, 2026.
• National Retail Federation, "NRF Forecasts 2026 Holiday Sales Growth as Consumers Remain Resilient," October 15, 2026.