By Andrew Smith is Director of Sales at ACI Transport

For most of the past generation, retail organized itself around a single annual curve. The calendar moved through buying, build, peak and winddown, then restarted. Merchandising plans, labor schedules, store-level incentives and the logistics infrastructure underneath all of it were engineered for that single-curve business. 

What retail runs on now is two peaks stacked tightly enough that operations built for one will fracture under the other. The forward peak is the one the industry has always planned for, with inventory flowing toward stores, fixtures arriving ahead of new openings and promotional volume staged against seasonal windows. 

There will be roughly 5,500 new U.S. stores opening this year, accompanied by the sector’s lowest store-closure count in three years. The forward peak is expanding, and retail has decades of institutional memory for how to manage it.

The reverse peak has been slower to earn a planning cycle of its own. Americans returned $850 billion of retail merchandise (roughly 16% of total sales) last year. Close to one in five digital orders moves back through the same system it came out of.

Reverse flow has its own cadence, a distinct set of carrier requirements and a risk profile outbound protocols were never designed to catch. It also lands predictably while the forward peak is still being closed out.

Most retailers are running a two-peak business on a one-peak operating model. The effects are visible to anyone close to store-level execution. District managers coordinate driver exceptions on Saturday mornings. Inventory planners rework forecasts against late pallets. Sales leads who should be focused on CX during the highest-traffic weeks of their year end up on dispatcher calls about a missed window in Louisville. 

The net result is labor hired to run logistics instead of stores, a tradeoff that surfaces as fatigue, missed grand openings, stockouts during peak traffic weeks and in-store experiences that never quite deliver what the brand promised at the door. For leaders who have spent careers reigning labor per square foot, the cost of logistics pulling attention away from customer-facing work is one of the largest hidden operating drags in modern retail, and one of the least examined.

Closing the gap requires retail leaders to treat transportation the way they already treat merchandising and real estate, as a strategic function with a seat in planning conversations rather than a procurement line item renegotiated at year-end.

The operators I see making the transition well share four habits:

1. They plan for both peaks on the same calendar. Reverse flow gets a dedicated forecast, capacity reservation, performance metrics and line of executive accountability. The January returns wave receives the same operational seriousness as the November inbound build because it carries comparable customer-facing consequences when it breaks.

2. They audit where logistics exceptions actually land inside the organization. If the people solving freight problems during peak weeks are store managers, assistant buyers or regional directors whose titles have nothing to do with transportation, the operating model is already underwater. Those labor dollars belong in front of customers and merchandise, not troubleshooting a late truck.

3. They stress-test carrier vetting before fraud finds them. Retail shipments now face impersonation and documentation schemes that did not exist five years ago. Insurance validation, identity verification and ongoing monitoring have moved from back-office hygiene into frontline risk management. Any retailer that has not reviewed vetting protocols in the past year is carrying exposure that has not yet been priced in.

4. They demand visibility that spans both directions of flow. An analysis of the U.S. third-party logistics market notes that leading retailers have reduced stockouts by about 15% through stronger supply chain visibility. The data infrastructure producing that performance sits increasingly with logistics partners rather than retailer IT. Leaders who write real-time visibility into contracts as a non-negotiable, for outbound and returns alike, position every other discipline to make better decisions faster.

Each of these moves requires planning, accountability, capital allocation and contract structure to be rebuilt around the shape of the business as it actually operates today. The brands whose grand openings land on schedule, whose shelves stay stocked through peak traffic weeks and whose returns move through the system without consuming the first quarter of the new year are the ones that have already rebuilt for the two-peak reality. 

For those operators, transportation is the connective tissue underneath every customer-facing decision the brand makes. The most expensive lease in the best trade area cannot outrun a logistics infrastructure designed for the retail of yesteryear.

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