"Black Friday Is No Longer One Peak. Stores Are Already Running Multiple Surges"
Retailers have planned holiday inventory for months, yet the stock on hand can change daily or hourly. Seasonal labor is thin and often has only a few days of training. The same store that is serving walk-in customers is also expected to handle buy-online-pickup-in-store, curbside and ship-from-store orders. The operational pressure is no longer a single Black Friday spike. It is a series of promotional events that arrive throughout the year and leave less slack when the traditional peak arrives.
Dan McAllister, chief revenue officer at Creative Realities, said in written comments to The Supply Chainer that the biggest change is the speed at which retailers must decide and adapt. “In the past, if a retailer needed to respond to an inventory change in the middle of the holiday season, that meant printing new signage, shipping it to different locations and relying on store teams to get everything updated in time. That’s a lot to ask, especially in November and December, when you need every available associate helping customers, working the registers or managing pickup orders.” Digital signage connected to inventory and point-of-sale systems lets a central change appear across stores in minutes. It can also stop promoting an item that is already sold out or that never reached that location. “There’s nothing more frustrating for a shopper than seeing a great deal advertised on a screen, only to find out the product is already sold out or never made it to the store.”
Freight Pressures and Procurement Leverage Ahead of Peak Season
Arkestro provides AI-driven predictive procurement software that helps retailers and operators analyze freight and supplier data in real time, enabling faster, more informed negotiations and stronger visibility into costs and performance across complex supply chains - particularly relevant amid peak-season volatility and rising fuel surcharges.
In response to a query from the supply chain, Edmund Zagorin, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Arkestro, said:
“One of the biggest changes we’ve seen ahead of peak season is how retailers manage relationships with freight carriers, brokers, and 3PLs. Retail freight portfolios have gotten bigger and more complex over decades due to e-commerce and exploding catalogs of SKUs. The big challenge this year, however, has been fuel surcharges. It is not always obvious how these costs get distributed throughout the supply chain, and we saw a wave of force majeures from carriers earlier this year.”
“That means carriers are re-pricing the cost of freight more dynamically, and retail buyers are becoming more shrewd and discerning about how they architect deals with freight partners across their portfolio. There are a few technologies like real-time cargo visibility and predictive procurement that we are seeing operators using to gain leverage, striking better deals faster and monitoring carrier performance and SLAs more comprehensively. Strong consumer demand is the good news, but the bad news for peak season is that there are lots of headwinds eating into retailers’ margins. That has driven a push for more real-time cost visibility from carriers across the supply chain.”
Real-Time Visibility Amid Rising Costs
Shibu Sasidharan, senior vice president of strategy and growth at Exol, said Black Friday remains a major test but is no longer a single peak. “We’re seeing more promotional events throughout the year, and each one creates its own surge in demand that fulfillment networks have to absorb. By the time the holiday season arrives, retailers have already had to adjust their operations several times to keep up.” Inventory position is the deciding factor. “You can have plenty of stock available, but if it’s sitting hundreds of miles from where customers are placing orders, you will pay for it in transportation costs and longer delivery times.” Robotic storage and picking systems already on the floor let a site raise or lower throughput without the same seasonal hiring ramp and keep accuracy steady when volumes jump. The shift is toward treating that capacity as shared across a network rather than as a one-off investment in a single building.
McAllister said labor is one of the largest constraints during peak. Seasonal associates spend hours on tasks that do not serve customers when they must remove and replace physical signage overnight. Connected digital screens remove that work and can also answer common questions about availability, pickup location and wait times before the customer reaches an associate. Remote monitoring becomes essential because sending technicians from store to store during the busiest weeks is not practical. “If a screen goes dark on Black Friday, retailers need to identify the issue immediately and, whenever possible, resolve it remotely without disrupting store operations.”
The same coordination applies inside the store. Inventory planned months earlier is still promoted uniformly even when one location has sold out and another is overstocked. Signage tied to real-time inventory and point-of-sale data can highlight what is actually on the shelf and pull back on what is not. For customers collecting online orders, digital screens can direct them to the pickup point and reduce the congestion that otherwise forms at the register. Sasidharan said demand forecasts can only tell retailers so much when shopping patterns shift unexpectedly. The ability to move inventory closer to customers or to tap additional fulfillment capacity on short notice gives the network room to adjust when there is little time left to expand fixed infrastructure.
Peak is becoming a year-round condition. The stores and networks that absorb the next surge are those that can change what is promoted, where inventory sits and how much labor is required without waiting for printed signs, new hires or a transfer between buildings.
