Retail Experts on Holiday 2025: Consumer and Retailer Confusion, and AI Expectations

During a recent RetailWire roundtable hosted via LinkedIn earlier this month, CEO Chase Binnie was joined by a number of retail industry experts to take on an array of hot topics tied to this year’s holiday shopping season.

Following initial introductions, Binnie kicked off talks with an open-ended question asking for top-level predictions for this year’s holiday period as it concerned the retail business. Gwen Morrison — partner at Retail Cities and Candezent Advisory, and contributor to The Robin Report — was quick to point out that uncertainty was the word of the season.

“The consumer has certainly gone through tumultuous seasons — summer and into early fall — with a lot of unknowns… uncertainties. And so that’s caused a range of predictions for what this holiday season is going to bring, when people have not had a paycheck for a couple of weeks, or months, and lost their some of their benefits,” Morrison said. “It’s hard for people to have the confidence that we would hope for this time of year.”

VP of brand development for the Independent Grocers Alliance (IGA) Michael La Kier spoke of how, for both retail marketers and consumers, “The most wonderful time of the year has really become a complex maze.” A surprising economic resilience coinciding with macroeconomic headwinds — including tariffs, persistent inflation, and the recent government shutdown — had left both cohorts confused.

Scott Benedict, principal consultant for RETHINK Retail and CEO / founder of Benedict Enterprises, added that “cautious optimism was the word of the day,” gesturing toward spend projections of between high 3% and low 4% for the holiday season coming from sources.

“I feel like I’m usually the pessimist, and I was at the very beginning of the year in January: I immediately said I think holiday is going to be a challenge for retail. But given what we’ve seen over the last couple months, in the last few quarters, I do agree with Scott on the optimism piece and I actually think we’ll see slight growth just above inflation, which is what we saw last year,” said Melissa Minkow – global director, retail strategy and insights for CI&T.

“I actually agree with NRF [the National Retail Federation] as well. The key word of resilience that Michael mentioned is so crucial, because we now have a consumer that is just used to a state of uncertainty. We’ve had the pandemic, we’ve had many years of ups and downs and changes and I think we’ve become anti-fragile consumers,” Minkow continued.

RetailWire Roundtable Participants Take on Inventory, Private Label, and Retail AI Topics

Other major topics of discussion included:

• Holiday shopping season pull-forward: Zach Zalowitz — principal of commerce at Perficient — responded to a general consensus that the holiday deal season had both been diluted by a proliferation of sales events, and observed a moved-ahead cadence of these deals, which required earlier planning by teams. “Definitely have seen the planning pull forward in the year. Typically that’s in early September when you’re rallying the operations team digital and supply chain. These conversations are now starting in like late May, June and July. So you know, it’s less this big bang now,” Zalowitz suggested. “I see this long ramp-up, and how the operations team are starting to plan much earlier — I think a lot of that demand doesn’t just now hit on Cyber Monday, but into October and through November.”
• Dilution (or evolution) of the “doorbuster” must-have retail item: With Morrison asking those present to think of a singular doorbuster item this holiday go-around, La Kier noted that social media had somewhat diluted the concept due to a wider array of inventory choices, while Benedict underscored the retail-wide switch to the timed drop model, versus more traditional channels.
• Private label continues to impress: “And we [retailers, brands] say private label. But shoppers don’t think that way. Right? They think brands and, you know, value arguably is at the top of every shopper’s wish list for this holiday season. And so affordable affordability is in vogue,” La Kier stated on the private label question.

A major hinge of the conversation, perhaps unsurprisingly, rested upon the notion of AI’s place in the current, and future, retail environment.

La Kier began by stating that today’s AI capabilities were “the worst we’ll ever deal with,” as it will “continue to improve over the course of time” to become invaluable. Morrison followed up with a comparison between the tech stack “sound bytes” of past industry conferences – notably, NFTs and the metaverse – saying that while those concepts had lost their luster, retail AI was instead at “the beginning of a long trajectory.”

Zalowitz drilled down into AI’s current state of affairs when it came to retail operations.

“AI is real within these bespoke systems. Demand planning, inventory order management and then the front end solutions. The opportunity is: I don’t think they’re connected well. I don’t think there’s a lot of connectivity between the plan and the actual execution. That bridge is still not there,” he offered, saying that those enterprises which failed to connect the machine learning to a downstream execution system may be making missteps.

Minkow put a bow on this portion of the AI roundtable talk by endorsing AI as a true problem-solver: “AI definitely solves real problems for the consumer, it also definitely solves real problems for the retailers. So that’s why I’d say it’s not [mere] hype.”