Quick Answer
Discover five critical holiday retail decisions that help protect customer experience, staff capacity, fulfillment performance, and margins during peak trading.
Holiday trading does not fail because leaders lack dashboards. It fails when the operating picture does not translate into timely decisions. RETHINK Retail’s central thesis is that peak pressure should not be accepted as an unavoidable trade-off between customer experience and margin. The more useful question is whether retailers have designed the operating choices that let stores absorb higher demand without degrading service quality, staff effectiveness, or economics.
The 2026 retail backdrop reinforces the importance of that question. NRF forecasts U.S. retail sales growth of 4.4% in 2026 to $5.6 trillion (NRF, 2026). Deloitte’s retail research describes physical stores as increasingly important to customer experience, fulfillment, associate productivity, and margin performance rather than as isolated selling locations (Deloitte, 2026a; Deloitte, 2026b). Higher demand therefore raises the value of decision quality inside the store.
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