Between the last Friday of November and mid-January, a store goes through the busiest weeks of its year. Traffic climbs and the stockroom spills onto the sales floor. Extra staff who don't yet know the store layout join the team, and opening hours stretch into Sunday. Everything that drives up shrinkage happens at the same time. There is no shortage of lists of sensitive products. What is more often missing is a calendar: what to put in place before each peak moment of the holiday season, what to adjust during it, and what to review once the inventory count is done.
A peak spread over eight weeks
In stores and at head office alike, Black Friday is talked about as the high-risk day. Footfall counts paint a more nuanced picture. In its footfall forecasts for the 2025 season, published in September, Sensormatic Solutions expects the busiest day in France to be Saturday, January 10, the first Saturday of the winter sales, ahead of the Saturday after Black Friday (November 29) and the second Saturday of December (December 13). In the United States, the same source forecasts in-store traffic to be roughly stable, or down by 3% at most, compared with last year. So we are not dealing with a single peak, but with a succession of peaks, with weeks in between that are already busier than normal.
The context does not help. According to a study by the National Retail Federation and the Loss Prevention Research Council published in late October 2025, the American retailers surveyed that track this data recorded an average 18% increase in shoplifting incidents between 2023 and 2024. In its forecasts for the end of 2025, the same federation anticipates between 265,000 and 365,000 seasonal hires across the Atlantic, versus 442,000 last year. Fewer reinforcements for roughly stable footfall: if this pattern applies in your store, each salesperson on the floor will have more linear meters of shelving to cover. Preparation is therefore as much about organization as it is about stock.
Mid-November: preparing the ground before the first peak
The two weeks leading up to Black Friday are the only truly calm ones of the period. They are devoted to four checks.
- Identify the season's high-value aisles. Perfume and cosmetics gift sets, small tech products, spirits, toys, fashion accessories: the list varies by store format, and it shifts as Christmas approaches. Our guide to the most stolen products in stores provides a starting point.
- Review the angles of existing cameras after the Christmas layout is set up. Pallets, promotional islands, high POS displays and temporary stands redraw the store and sometimes hide an entire aisle. A walk around the sales floor with each camera's image in view is enough to spot the blind spots created by the new layout.
- Move sensitive products closer to staff walkways rather than relegating them to the back of the store, where no one goes once the crowds take up the team's attention.
- Write the alert schedule at the same time as the team schedule. For each opening slot, note a designated person, their backup and the device that receives the notifications.
Temporary staff: a short onboarding, clear instructions
An extra hire brought on for six weeks will not become a loss prevention specialist, and that is not what is expected of them. From their first day, they need to know which zones require regular rounds, whom to report a situation to when something catches their attention, and what they must not do. The most useful instruction fits in one sentence: go up to the customer and offer help. A well-positioned salesperson who greets and informs customers deters more reliably than a confrontation, which is not part of their role anyway.
The briefing is best done on the sales floor, in ten or fifteen minutes, in front of the aisles concerned. When the store employs security guards, this is the time to say who does what: seasonal staff guide and assist, while guards handle delicate situations. Our article on the complementarity between AI and security guards goes back over this division of roles.
Extended hours: organizing alerts slot by slot
Late-night openings, Sunday openings, the eves of holidays: extended hours have their fragile moments. Opening and closing are often handled by a reduced team, and restocking during peak traffic takes hands away from the aisle. Some gestures also take a form specific to the season: a product slipped into a large shopping bag from another retailer, an open gift box of which only the contents are kept, a stroller or trolley loaded with coats and parcels.
An alert is useless if no one receives it, or if the person who receives it doesn't know what to do with it. With Oxania, the video alert arrives in under 10 seconds on mobile, tablet or computer, with a clip that gradually zooms in on the point of interest: the technology detects, the team decides what happens next. During peak periods, this process must be set down in black and white:
- For each slot, a designated person receives the alert, with a backup for the times when they are at the checkout or in the stockroom.
- They watch the clip before moving, to verify what it actually shows.
- They choose the response: go to the aisle and offer help, call a security guard, or do nothing if the situation is normal.
- They record the outcome (confirmed, not confirmed, no action taken), which will feed into the season review.
In the middle of the rush, this last step is the first one to be skipped. Yet it is what makes it possible, in January, to know which slots and which zones really caused problems.
January sales: a second peak with tired teams
The January sales start when the December extra staff have left and the permanent team is coming out of six weeks of pressure. Returns and price relabeling disrupt the aisles, and vigilance drops, which is only human. A new briefing is needed, even a short one, along with a check that the alert schedule matches the new opening hours.
January is also the month of returns. In the United States, the NRF and Appriss Retail report on returns indicated that retailers expected 16.5% of returns during the 2023 holiday season to be fraudulent, and that 44% of respondents had received returns of stolen merchandise over the past year. These figures cannot be transposed as they are to the French market. They do serve as a reminder, however, that a clear returns policy (receipt, time limit, condition of the product), applied in the same way by everyone, reinforcements included, is part of loss prevention.
The season review: preparing for next year starting in February
Once the inventory is done, the shrinkage figure for the period says more when set against what happened on the sales floor. Dashboards that combine counting, heatmaps and statistics by zone and by time slot, set against the outcomes logged by the team during the season, help answer specific questions:
- Which slots concentrated the alerts: openings, end of day, late-night hours, Sundays?
- Which zones were the most exposed, and did the Christmas layout play a part?
- How many alerts went unanswered because no one was available at the right time?
The answers feed directly into next year's schedule: extra staff placed differently, layout revised, designated people moved to different slots. Our article on the key indicators of shrinkage explains how to track this data over time. It is best to do this review in February, while everyone still remembers the evenings when the checkouts were overflowing and the perfume aisle was left with no one in it.
