It is Friday night, and the forecast says rain. An outlet manager looks at Saturday’s roster, decides footfall will be light, and cancels two part-timers’ shifts. It takes thirty seconds and saves perhaps a hundred dollars in wages.
One of those part-timers had turned down another job for that shift. Next week, when the manager posts Saturday again, she takes the other job instead. Her replacement is a first-timer who does not know where the stock is, working a Saturday when the queue runs out the door.
Nobody records that as a cost. The roster report shows a saving. And it points to the distinction that matters most in how Singapore retail and F&B operators manage part-timers. Flexibility and instability look alike on a roster, but they land on opposite sides. Flexibility is a worker choosing when to work. Instability is the business changing its mind after the worker has chosen. Part-timers want the first. Too many rosters hand them the second.
Flexibility is not the same as instability
Operators do not cancel shifts out of carelessness. Demand is hard to predict, labour is usually the largest cost a store manager controls, and a shift cancelled the night before looks like money saved. Keeping commitments loose feels like prudence.
The research says the saving is an illusion. In 2015 and 2016, researchers from UC Hastings, the University of Chicago and UNC ran a randomised experiment across 28 Gap stores. Every store moved to publishing schedules two weeks ahead and dropped on-call shifts. Nineteen went further: consistent start and end times, the same core shifts each week, an app to swap shifts, and a soft guarantee of 20 or more hours for part-timers who wanted them. In those stores, median sales rose 7% and labour productivity rose 5%, about US$6.20 of extra revenue for every labour hour (Stable Scheduling Study).
The other half of the bill is people leaving. Harvard’s Shift Project followed 1,827 US retail and food-service workers through 2017 (Choper, Schneider and Harknett, 2022). Workers who got less than a week’s notice of their schedule were about 35% more likely to quit. Those who had a shift cancelled were 38% more likely. Those who faced three or more kinds of instability were 50% more likely. In a sector where annual turnover in the sample already ran at 52%, that is the difference between a team and a revolving door.
Put the two together and the Friday-night cancellation looks different. The wage saving is visible and small. The costs are a worker more likely to leave, a replacement who needs training, and a Saturday served by someone on their first day. None of this is an argument against flexible staffing. A short shift posted and filled the same day to cover a genuine spike is flexibility working as intended. The damage comes from what happens after a shift has been confirmed.
More part-timers is not the problem. More strangers is.
The usual reaction to this argument is to conclude that part-timers are the risk. The evidence says something narrower. Kesavan, Staats and Gilland (Management Science, 2014) found that as a store’s share of part-time and temporary staff rises, sales and profit improve at first and then fall. Flexible labour helps up to a point, and past it, the store is running on people who do not know the job.
Ton and Huckman (Organization Science, 2008) found the same pattern from a different angle. Across 48 months of data from a US retail chain, staff turnover dragged down profit margins and customer service, except in stores that held staff to clear, standard processes. Where the routine was strong, a new face did little damage. Where it was loose, every departure showed up in the numbers.
Flexii’s own store-level data from Singapore points to where the line sits. At the joint masterclass with the Singapore Retailers Association and Huggs Coffee, Flexii shared what it calls the four-shift gateway: workers who complete one or two shifts at a store treat it as a one-off gig, while those who reach four shifts at the same business become far more likely to keep coming back. Stores that built a pool of around 20 trusted workers they re-book regularly saw the number of workers they blocked from future bookings fall from about eight a month to about one, over a two-year tracking period.
That is the whole argument in one number: four. A part-timer on their fourth shift at your outlet is a different worker from one on their first. The job is not to use fewer part-timers. It is to stop turning them into strangers.
It is also where the Gap result and flexible staffing meet. The Gap stores got consistency by fixing everyone’s core shifts. An outlet using on-demand staff can get the same consistency a different way: by re-booking the same people.
What part-timers actually respond to
The same Flexii data, shared at the SRA and Huggs Coffee masterclass, is blunt about what workers want. Over 90% of active workers on the platform prioritise shifts of four to six hours, not full eight-hour blocks. And 93% withdraw their earnings within five minutes of finishing a shift. Shorter shifts fit around study, caregiving or a second job, and fast pay matters to people who plan week to week. For them, a predictable, clearly paid shift is the whole point.
That shapes what is worth fixing. Post shifts as soon as you know you need them. Same-day posting for a genuine spike is fine, but predictable demand such as weekends, paydays and promotions should go out well ahead, because notice of under a week is where the quit risk jumps.
Treat a confirmed shift as a commitment. If demand drops, move the person to stock-taking, visual merchandising or training rather than cancelling, or pay a minimum for late cancellations. The Harvard data links a cancelled shift to a 38% higher chance of losing that worker, which is a steep price for a quiet afternoon.
Make the first four shifts deliberate: the same person meeting a newcomer, the same routine each time, and the answers to common questions written down. That is the stretch where a one-off gig becomes a habit, and where Ton and Huckman’s process discipline pays off. Show the rate, the overtime rules and the payment date before someone accepts, too, so nothing about the shift is a surprise.
Finally, offer shifts first to people who have worked with you before. A pool of familiar, on-demand workers gives an outlet both things at once: the flexibility to scale up and down, and faces who already know the floor.
None of this means giving up flexibility. It asks for discipline about the commitments already made, which is exactly what a last-minute cancellation skips.
Why this matters more for part-timers in Singapore from 2026
Under the Retail Progressive Wage Model, the minimum hourly gross wage for part-time Retail Assistants and Cashiers rose to $12.77 on 1 September 2026, up from $12.09, and rises again to $13.45 on 1 September 2027. When everyone in a category pays close to the same rate, pay stops being how an employer wins staff. The roster becomes the offer.
Part-timers also have more room to choose. In MOM’s Labour Force in Singapore 2025 report, the share of workers who want more hours than they can get fell to 1.9%, from 2.3% in 2024. A part-timer who is not short of work can afford to be selective, and a shift cancelled on Friday night is the easiest one to walk away from.
The bigger opportunity is a group most operators are not reaching at all. Only 5.9% of resident women aged 25 to 64 in Singapore work part-time, against an OECD average of 13.7%, among the lowest of the countries compared. The same MOM report notes that married women with children are more likely to work part-time than single women or married women without children.
For a parent, a shift is only usable if it is short, known in advance and not cancelled the night before. That is a description of good flexible staffing. Four-to-six-hour shifts, posted early and honoured once confirmed, are how an outlet opens its roster to people who could work but currently do not, and given how long it takes to replace a frontline hire, every one of them who comes back is a shift that does not need recruiting for.
Ten questions to ask your outlet managers
Half an hour, honest answers, no preparation.
- How many days before a shift do we publish the roster? What was it six months ago?
- How many confirmed shifts did we cancel last month, and at how much notice?
- What share of last month’s first-time part-timers reached a fourth shift with us?
- Who meets a new part-timer on their first shift, and what happens in the first hour?
- Can a part-timer see their rate, hours and payment date before they accept?
- What share of last month’s shifts were worked by someone who had worked with us before?
- Do we offer shifts to returning workers before posting them to everyone?
- When someone stops accepting our shifts, do we know why?
- Are our shifts built around four to six hours, or around the eight-hour block we have always used?
- Which of our full-time perks could extend to part-timers at near-zero cost?
The answers you least like are the list to work on.
A note on the evidence
Most rigorous research on shift scheduling comes from the US, and Singapore’s rules and labour market differ, so treat the percentages as direction rather than forecast. Flexii’s figures come from its own platform and describe the stores and workers using it. The pattern holds across all of them, though: predictable shifts keep people, familiar people serve customers better, and the saving from a last-minute cancellation is almost always smaller than it looks.
Start with one number this month: how many of last month’s first-time part-timers reached a fourth shift with you. If nobody can answer, that is the first finding.
Want a bench of workers who already know your outlet? Re-book the same people instead of recruiting new ones.
