Getting ready for the holidays: seasonal staff, returns and the volume spike

You're hiring someone for December, your return policy hasn't been looked at in a while, and the rush always arrives faster than expected. Here is what's worth settling now, whether you run a restaurant, a shop or a salon, not the week before Christmas.

Seasonal staff have the same rights as everyone else on the team

Someone hired for a few weeks in December is not an exception to labour standards. According to the CNESST, Quebec's workplace standards body, seasonal workers have the same rights as the rest of the staff: they're covered in the event of a workplace accident and are entitled to pay equity, the same as a permanent employee.

Training counts as paid work too. Time spent in training or a trial period must be paid, even if the official start date comes later and regardless of where that training takes place.

There's also an administrative detail owners often miss. For payroll reported to the CNESST, a seasonal employee counts the same as any other: their hours are added to the business's twelve month reference period, not set aside because the contract only runs six weeks.

In practice, that means putting together a short onboarding plan before the person's first shift: how the till works, how tips get settled, the basics of the payment terminal. Improvising all of that on a busy Friday night costs more in mistakes than the half hour it takes to explain in advance.

A one page cheat sheet is usually enough: where the spare paper roll is, how to void a transaction, who to call on a Saturday night when nobody else is around. It's not the training that takes time, it's the lack of it that gets expensive the day something goes wrong in front of a line of customers.

Your return policy is about to get tested in January

Gifts bought in December come back in January. That's predictable, so it's worth checking now what your exchange and refund policy actually says, rather than inventing it at the counter in front of an unhappy customer.

Quebec's consumer protection office, the OPC, is clear on this: a merchant is free to set the terms of a return policy, but must respect it once it exists, and must clearly bring it to the customer's attention. A policy that only lives in the owner's head doesn't count as one, legally speaking.

A concrete example: a shop that sells a sweater on December 15 and posts "30 days to exchange" has to honour that window even if it ends after the holidays, in January. A customer who comes back on January 12 with a receipt is entitled to expect the posted deadline to be followed exactly.

One separate point that gets missed often: the legal warranty applies no matter what your own policy says. If a good is not functional, or can't be used for a reasonable length of time, it has to be repaired, exchanged or refunded, whether or not you have a posted exchange policy at the till.

One simple habit helps a lot during this stretch: tie every return back to the original sale instead of relying on the customer's or employee's memory. A receipt or a transaction traced on the terminal settles most disagreements in a few seconds, no argument needed.

• What's posted at the till matches exactly what actually happens at the till.
• Seasonal staff know the precise deadline, not an approximate version repeated from memory.
• Sale, personalized or perishable items have a clearly stated exclusion, if your policy has one.

The spike lasts a few days, not all of December

Holiday volume doesn't build up gradually over four weeks. Year after year, Interac finds that a single day, almost always in the week before Christmas, accounts for the bulk of debit card transactions nationally, with tens of millions of transactions in that one day alone.

For a business, that changes how you plan. Extra staff scheduling and equipment checks should target that specific week, not be spread evenly across all of December. A salon selling gift certificates and a shop clearing its last stock before Christmas both hit the same kind of concentrated peak.

If your terminal has ever lost its connection mid transaction, use a quieter moment to confirm your backup way of taking payment still works. It's easier to test on a slow Tuesday in November than on December 22 with a line out the door.

It's also a good time for a quick call to your equipment provider, before their lines get busy too: confirm holiday support hours, and check that you have enough spare paper rolls and batteries on hand so you're not improvising on December 23.

One thing to do this week: reread your posted return policy, confirm it matches what actually happens at the till, and give anyone joining the team for December some training, even brief, before their first shift.