Quick answer: Your POS already knows. Export last year's Black Friday week sales, upload the file to ChatGPT (the free plan works) and ask for sales by hour. In about 20 minutes you get your busiest hours and a draft schedule that puts more people on the floor when shoppers show up.
What it does
At 11 a.m. on Black Friday, three couples are waiting to ask about sectionals while one salesperson writes up a financing deal. Some of them leave. A study of 41 stores in a large U.S. retail chain found every store was understaffed during a three-hour peak, and estimated that matching staff to traffic could recover 6.15% of lost sales (Mani, Kesavan and Swaminathan). Your sales by hour show your peaks.
Price
No cost on ChatGPT Free (file uploads and data analysis have usage limits). Gemini or Copilot work too. Checked Nov 3, 2026.
Try it in 20 minutes
Export every sale from Black Friday week last year (Nov 24 to 30, 2025) with date, time and total. Delete customer names and phone numbers.
Upload it with the prompt below.
Check the peaks against what you remember, then copy the plan into your schedule.
Measure: on the day, tally "shoppers who left before anyone helped them" by hour. Compare sales per staff hour with last year.
Copy-paste prompt
I run [STORE NAME], an independent [STORE TYPE] store open [HOURS]. The attached file is last year's sales from Black Friday week. Using only this data: 1) show number of sales and dollars by day and hour as a table, 2) list the 3 busiest hours each day, 3) recommend how many people I need on the floor each hour if one salesperson can handle about [NUMBER] sales an hour, plus one person on the cash/financing desk at peaks, 4) build a schedule for these staff and their availability: [NAMES AND HOURS]. Flag any hour where I'm short. Don't guess missing data; tell me what's missing.
FAQ
My POS can't export times. Use a paper tally of shoppers by hour for the two Saturdays before Black Friday.
Is the data safe? Remove customer details first. In ChatGPT settings you can turn off "Improve the model for everyone."
Related: Which products should go on your Black Friday sale? · Free AI answers staff product questions
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