Best Buy Assistant Store Manager Haley Raker says, "We've actually been hiring a lot within the last month or two. Normally during the holiday season we plan on staffing up about 25 to 30 percent, so we've definitely been increasing our staffing lately."

Scheels Assistant Store Leader Zac Soetmelk says, "Kind of what we like to do is we bulk up right before Thanksgiving. We usually have a long training process. We don't necessarily hire specifically for the holiday season, but we do try to carry more people through the holidays and kind of carry year round so we don't have a whole lot of seasonal positions. We just carry mostly. We shut off our hiring right before Thanksgiving and then kind of go with what we got through the holidays."

This year Thanksgiving is the earliest it can be on the calendar, which gives shoppers 32 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas to find those gifts. And with those extra days, retailers say they expect to have a better season than past years.

Raker says, "I think it will definitely help shoppers out for those who don't get it done right away, it will definitely give them some extra time, so I think they'll appreciate that."

Soetmelk says, "Having the extra days definitely helps and for us it kind of depends on the weather. If it's a good nice, cold, snowy, that kind of gets our cold weather sales going pretty good, and we're expecting business to be good just like it always is."

And despite high anxiety about the U.S. economy, the National Retail Federation is forecasting that sales will grow 4.1 percent this year to $586.1 billion. So even though it may seem early to think about holiday shopping, the Christmas season is right around the corner.

Tessa Thomas