Seasonal holiday hiring — which was strong in recent years as consumers went on a pandemic-juiced spending spree — is lackluster this year as we head into the final shopping weeks of 2023.

The Labor Department reported that seasonally adjusted retail payrolls were down 38,000 from October to November. Transportation and warehousing payrolls fell 5,000 and are down 61,000 since hitting a peak in October 2022.

Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks seasonal hiring, reported that as of October 2023, retail hiring was up 3% from 2022, while warehousing and transportation hiring was down 27%.

The Labor Department’s November jobs report points “definitively towards weakness in holiday hiring,” said Senior Vice President Andy Challenger. “It’s unlikely the holiday season will buck the trend of continued cooling in the labor market we have observed most of this year.”

In what is still a historically tight job market, though, predicting holiday labor demand in the retail and leisure and hospitality sectors can be difficult.

Well 80 Brewhouse is a popular bar and restaurant in downtown Olympia, Washington — the state capital and a college town. Tuesday is Trivia Night; Wednesday there’s bingo; Thursday, discount cocktails.

Owner Chris Knudson said business traditionally dips heading into early fall, then bounces back after Halloween with family gatherings, workplace parties and the like.

“We’re definitely picking up,” said Knudson. “Usually it’s pretty busy post-Thanksgiving through the holidays and then the New Year.”

After a rough patch early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Knudson’s business had a strong recovery. It’s tapered off slightly this year as consumers returned to more historically normative patterns of shopping and going out.

Knudson said that while the market for leisure and hospitality employees is still pretty tight, it’s not as hard to hire kitchen and wait staff now as it was last year. “We aren’t scrambling every day to try and find someone to fill a shift. We do have some college kids that will come back and work for us through the holidays because they’re on break. Overall we’re doing OK, and we’re having to pinch a little bit with labor and just make sure we’re being wise with that.”

That sense of caution characterizes the holiday season labor market nationwide.

“Hiring demand decreased in all selected functions in November,” said Ger Doyle, senior VP at staffing and recruitment firm ManpowerGroup. “It’s down so far this year compared to last year — across retail, hospitality.”

Doyle said both sectors were down approximately 10% from January to November compared to 2022. But he said he thinks companies are also hiring smarter this year, “hiring much earlier — we saw that in Q2 into Q3,” Doyle said. “It is still taking far longer to fill roles than it did pre-pandemic. So companies are not waiting for last minute.”

But they have been waiting for consumers to reveal themselves and show how eager they are to shop and spend, said Andy Challenger. “Every signal that we got coming into this season was uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty from retailers,” he said. “They really did not know what was going to happen.”

Challenger, Gray tracks seasonal hiring announcements by major companies — and this year has had the fewest since 2013. “We saw so few announcements from companies coming into this season because they were so uncertain. It may indicate what that experience is going to be like for consumers — if they’re going to be spending long times in lines for stores that are understaffed, getting presents delivered on time.”

Meanwhile, it isn’t proving quite as financially challenging to hire workers this year, said Haley Damm, VP of Midwest operations at staffing agency Adecco.

“Last year around this time, there was a huge run on the wage, right? And it was the only thing we were talking about,” she said.

Damm, who started with the firm as a temp a decade ago, said that this year, Addeco is finding that job seekers want more than just higher wages.

“We do have a group of seasonal employees come back to us year after year,” Damm said. “Although being competitive in the wage is important, they want to see things like accessibility to benefits. Are they getting a full-time schedule, even?”

Damm said in the past, older workers and retirees were a crucial component of the temporary seasonal workforce, allowing retailers to staff up for the holiday rush.

She said that well dried up early in the pandemic.

“Many of them did capitalize on some of the early-retirement opportunities, or simply did not feel safe going to work at the time,” said Damm. “Now that we’re a little more stable, we have seen a huge push of retirees coming back into the workforce.”

Data from the Labor Department shows workers age 55 and older still haven’t returned to their pre-pandemic level of labor force participation. But they continue to catch up.