Walmart Associates Report Severe Staffing Shortages During New Year Surge

A wave of first-person reports from Walmart front-line associates documenting staffing strain over the New Year period painted a picture of stores struggling to keep up with online order volumes. The thread, active Dec. 31, 2025 through Jan. 4, 2026, collected accounts of stores operating with only one to three employees on the sales floor during peak order drops and handling pick-backlogs described as reaching hundreds of drops per hour.

Workers described juggling multiple responsibilities at once, including picking, staging, and processing exceptions, often with little or no relief from managers or additional staff. Several posts singled out evening and night shifts as particularly thinly covered, and associates at neighborhood-market format stores said those smaller locations were hit especially hard by the surge in online orders and the resulting operational pressure.

The thread also captured tension between on-the-ground staffing needs and managerial assessments of anticipated traffic. According to the posts, some associates were told by managers that the store was "overstaffed for predicted traffic" even as real-time order volumes spiked and backlogs mounted. That disconnect between forecasting and immediate demand was a recurring theme in the accounts.

These firsthand reports matter for workers because sustained understaffing during high-volume e-commerce periods can increase physical and mental strain, reduce opportunities for scheduled breaks, complicate holiday pay and scheduling, and raise risks for mistakes or safety incidents. The forums where these posts appeared are commonly used by associates to compare experiences, clarify pay and holiday scheduling, and share ad-hoc coping strategies, and this thread served as a running log of how scheduling and workload pressures unfolded during a busy sales window.

The accounts raise broader operational questions about forecasting and staffing for peak online traffic, particularly in smaller store formats and overnight shifts that traditionally have fewer employees on duty. For employees, the immediate concerns are workload, adequate staffing and predictable scheduling. For managers and corporate planners, the reports underscore the need to reconcile staffing algorithms and predicted traffic with rapid, real-time fluctuations in order volumes to avoid repeated surges in backlog and worker strain.