Throughout the year labor expenses are a big focus by upper management. Tight scrutiny is given to the "labor percentage", the amount of money that you spend on payroll expressed as a percentage of total sales. Due to this pressure, managers only schedule the minimum number of employees possible. When the holidays roll around, the sales are significantly higher, and since the labor goals remain a fairly constant percentage, managers can spend more labor dollars and hence schedule more hours. The problem with that is that due to labor constraints throughout the rest of the year, every employee is already working, if not full-time hours, then the maximum amount of hours for which they are available (part-timers usually are part-timers due to school, or a second job). So the amount of work has increased, but the numbers of people doing it has not. The result is going to be several things that a customer isn't going to like, one is longer lines at the checkout because everyone is already there and there's no one else to call in. The company where I worked had a "solution" - cross train non-cashiers to work a checkstand when it got busy. This may work in the short-term - you get a couple of extra people cashiering during a rush, but during the holidays it's a rush all the time. While your dairy clerks, and produce managers and cart pushers are checking, who's filling the milk, stocking the sweet potatoes and bringing in all the carts from outside? This helps to cause the other problem: out of stock product.
Depending on the size of the store, product might be brought in every day, or 2-3 days per week. It is impossible to accurately forecast the sales of every single item 100% of the time. For most of my time in retail grocery I did sales forecasts for the store, I broke them down to the day of the week and to the department. I was extremely accurate - for the whole store - but I never even attempted to predict what the sales of every product in the store would be. Department managers often had to make a rough guess in order to have enough for an ad but even then the guess was either too high or too low. Someone not in the business might suggest that over-ordering would be the way to go, and we often did just that, estimating high so as not to run out, but with many items you had a narrow window in which to sell them, and once that window closed, you were stuck with them. This cost money, and if the store isn't turning a profit, then eventually it will close down. A bigger problem when it comes to out of stocks is product that is in the store, but not on the shelf. The average amount of units of any item that a shelf slot holds is twelve (one case), some faster selling products will have 2 or 4 cases on the shelf. But this is a very limited amount. A high volume store can go through 24 cans of sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce in less than an hour. Of course, for the high volume and ad items, there are displays, but many people walk right by big displays and are then confronted by an empty shelf. Sometimes even the displays sell down. So this is where the problem in the previous paragraph and this one come together. Even if there is plenty of everything "in the back", someone still has to get it out of "the back" and onto the shelf, and those someones are also checking, bagging groceries, shagging carts, cleaning bathrooms, helping customers find things, taking phone calls, putting in orders for the next day, and a hundred others things.
This is a high stress time for your typical grocery employee. The employees are working maximum hours and the salaried managers are working unpaid overtime. No matter how hard they try they can't keep up. Then you come in and complain that they're out of something, they go to the back room and find what you're looking for, but you're gone, off to harass someone else. As they're stocking the shelf with the item that you apparently no longer need, they are stopped by several dozen customers asking questions and a handful complaining that they are blocking the aisle and that they should stock when it's not busy. They make a list of all the things in the aisle that need restocking and head to the back to get what they need, but it takes 20 minutes to get back there, because you are still looking for that item you asked about a half hour ago that you didn't wait for and 10 other customers want to know where the stuffing mix is. The harried employee gets his cart loaded up, but gets called to a different aisle because the shelf is empty over there too, then he's called on to check, then he has to bring in carts, and finally after an hour or more he remembers that he was restocking aisle 10 and its starts all over again. Oh, and don't forget the abuse that you get if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas".
Some customers try to play it smart and shop late in the evening. That works pretty well during the others times of the year, but by 11:00 pm the store is trashed and won't be looking decent again until the night crew gets everything filled up again. (Free advice, shop early morning when all the displays are still full and the employees haven't yet sunk into a disabling depression)
And don't ever, ever, ever express sympathy for someone who is working on Thanksgiving, or Christmas Eve (or in some businesses, like convenience store) if you are in their shopping; if you gave a shit, you wouldn't be in there.
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