How Understaffing Is Driving Retailers Toward Supplemental Inventory Staffing

There’s a quiet crisis reshaping the American retail landscape, and it isn’t supply chain disruption or inflation. It’s the people problem: chronic, persistent understaffing that has left store floors thin, stockrooms chaotic and inventory counts a logistical nightmare. According to a 2024 survey of 14,000 workers conducted by Harvard’s Kennedy School, 53 percent of employees believe their workplace is “always” or “often” understaffed. In retail specifically, the consequences of that reality don’t just show up in longer checkout lines or empty shelves. They show up in inaccurate inventory data, missed shrink and cycle count backlogs that compound with every passing week until they become a serious threat to the bottom line.

What makes this crisis particularly stubborn is that it’s largely intentional. As Harvard Kennedy School professor Daniel Schneider has documented through years of workplace surveys, understaffing predates the pandemic and reflects deliberate cost management by retail operators. It’s “a really good way to control personnel costs,” Schneider notes, describing it as functionally similar to holding wages low and cutting hours to the absolute minimum. The evidence that this is a choice rather than a circumstance shows up clearly when you compare staffing levels across companies in the same sector: workers at In-N-Out Burger report little understaffing while workers at McDonald’s report consistently high levels. Same industry, very different decisions. “This is a business decision being made here,” Schneider says.

Retail and grocery environments were already running lean before the pandemic, and the last few years have pushed that leanness past the breaking point. When stores operate with skeleton crews, the workers who remain absorb responsibilities that were never written into their job descriptions. One Kennedy School report found that 83 percent of millennials report taking on up to six tasks beyond their role due to turnover, and retail workers are no exception. When everyone is stretched thin covering the floor, answering phones and running the register, inventory-related tasks like cycle counts, receiving verification and shrink audits fall to the back of the line every single time.

Inaccurate inventory data creates cascading downstream problems: phantom inventory that inflates on-hand numbers, out-of-stocks that frustrate shoppers and ordering errors that result in overages or shortfalls at exactly the wrong moments. Retailers operating with reduced headcount find that their associates simply can’t execute a thorough count without pulling critical labor away from the floor.

The self-checkout era has made things measurably worse, not better. Schneider’s research found that grocery stores with self-checkout machines are often understaffed beyond what they should be, possibly because management makes an “over-adjustment” to a lower headcount based on the assumption that self-checkout replaces the need for floor associates. It doesn’t, and the result is stores that are simultaneously more automated and more chaotic. Self-checkout lanes carry shrink rates of 3.5 percent compared to just 0.2 percent for staffed checkout lanes, and frustrated customers who encounter malfunctions or errors have no one nearby to help them. The labor savings on paper become losses in practice, and the inventory data suffers accordingly.

What makes this especially costly is the direct financial connection between understaffing and retail shrink. Global retail shrinkage was projected to reach $132 billion in 2024, up from $112 billion in 2022, and shrink-related blind spots also increase the risk of stockout events and complicate returns management, both of which further strain margins. While organized theft grabs most of the headlines, loss prevention experts point out that operational inefficiencies, including sloppy counts, poor receiving practices and administrative errors, account for nearly two-thirds of inventory loss at many stores. Many retailers that eliminated non-essential jobs during the Great Recession or the pandemic struggle to maintain accurate inventory counts in store, adding significantly to their shrink losses. Physical retail stores average inventory accuracy of around 65 percent, well below the 90 percent minimum benchmark that separates competitive operators from struggling ones. That gap isn’t a technology problem. It’s a staffing problem, and it’s costing retailers in ways that don’t always show up cleanly on a loss prevention report until the damage is already done.

Understaffing also creates the conditions for the very theft it leaves retailers unable to address. As the American Prospect noted in its March 2026 investigation into workplace understaffing, chain stores running with a single cashier and a skeleton crew are far more vulnerable to organized retail crime, and the now-ubiquitous decision to lock up merchandise behind plexiglass is itself a downstream consequence of having too few people on the floor. Locking shelves isn’t a theft-prevention strategy so much as it’s an admission that there aren’t enough workers to deter theft any other way. The locked shelf is the symptom. The staffing deficit is the disease.

Peak seasons make everything worse. Holiday windows, back-to-school rushes and post-inventory fiscal deadlines all land when staffing pressure is already at its highest. Shrink goes undetected, replenishment cycles break down and the resulting gaps follow retailers well into the next quarter.

Supplemental inventory staffing has emerged as one of the most practical solutions to this structural problem. Rather than asking an already-depleted in-house team to execute inventory counts on top of their regular workload, retailers are turning to specialized third-party providers who bring trained counters, dedicated technology and the organizational bandwidth to get it done efficiently and accurately. This approach keeps core staff focused on customer service and daily operations while ensuring that inventory data doesn’t become a casualty of understaffing. The separation of responsibilities also improves count reliability, since a dedicated team isn’t distracted by the competing demands of a live retail environment where the next customer complaint or register malfunction is always thirty seconds away.

When inventory counting falls on the shoulders of workers already exhausted from covering roles that shouldn’t be theirs, errors multiply and morale erodes. Schneider’s Kennedy School research found clear evidence that workers in chronically understaffed grocery environments are more frequently bullied by customers and less likely to be treated with basic respect on the job. Supplemental staffing during peak seasons is as much a workforce protection strategy as it is a data quality one, removing a significant and unnecessary burden from associates who are already stretched past what any reasonable job description should require.

More than 90 percent of retailers say real-time inventory accuracy is essential to achieving their loss prevention goals, and 93 percent see value in integrating RFID with loss prevention platforms. Retailers who rely on overextended in-house staff to execute counts manually are leaving that technology investment underutilized. Supplemental inventory teams that arrive equipped with advanced scanning tools and a singular focus on count accuracy are far better positioned to generate the clean, reliable data that modern inventory and loss prevention systems need to function as intended.

Companies like Datascan have built their service model around exactly this need, providing retailers with trained personnel and advanced scanning technology to execute inventory counts with the accuracy and speed that in-house teams simply can’t replicate when they’re already stretched past capacity. With capabilities spanning grocery, retail, convenience and self-scan environments across more than 42 countries, and same-day scanner shipping available when clients need to move fast, Datascan steps into the staffing gap without disrupting store operations or pulling floor associates away from the customers who need them.

The understaffing epidemic isn’t going away quickly, and the structural forces behind it, from corporate cost-cutting to weakened worker leverage to the false economies of self-checkout, are deeply entrenched. Retailers who wait for the labor market to self-correct will keep paying for that patience in inventory losses, undetected shrink and burned-out associates who are one bad peak season away from walking out the door. The smarter move is to recognize that inventory counting is highly technical, time-sensitive and cleanly separable from daily floor operations, which makes it an ideal candidate for specialized supplemental support. The retailers treating it that way are already pulling ahead.