As the holiday season approaches, retailers are scrambling to get the right amount of inventory placed at stores and warehouses so they can meet customer demand while avoiding the kind of excess ordering that plagued companies in 2021 and 2022.

Major retailers made significant progress in pairing down inventory levels this year, but the holiday season marks another opportunity for companies to potentially get it wrong, and this is pushing some operators to embrace new technology solutions to inventory management.

• Walmart, for example, is betting on a machine-learning algorithm to predict inventory needs at its 4,700 stores across the country.
• Providers in this space are also getting attention from venture capitalists. Centro, which provides automated inventory control, raked in $2 million in pre-seed funding last week.

The growing interest in cutting-edge tech to help manage inventory comes at a juncture point for retailers. Prior to the pandemic, so-called “just-in-time” supply chains helped companies maintain lean inventories. But this left them without a buffer when supply chains started acting up, which explains why many embraced a “just-in-case” approach in recent years.

Now just-in-time is making a comeback, and technology could be key to making it work.

Keep reading here.—AV

Retailers are grappling with steep turnover rates—as high as 60%–70% annually, and 75.8% for in-store retail employees.

Wondering how turnover became such a problem and what retailers can do to turn things around? So did Workday. They dug into the stats behind high turnover and mapped out how retailers can use digital tech to break the cycle of constantly recruiting, training, and hiring new workers.

They laid it all out in their latest report, Overturning turnover: Digital technology to help you reverse the great retail resignation. Check it out to learn about:

• the recent shift in workplace priorities
• how retailers can better meet the needs of their frontline teams
• choosing digital tools to build, engage, and retain a loyal, skilled workforce for years to come.

Get the full report.

The teens, of course, love Taylor Swift and TikTok, Piper Sandler’s semiannual Taking Stock with Teens survey found, but the report also revealed a few harder-to-guess insights on what they’re into these days.

The survey, which features insights from 9,193 teenagers, found that their spending dipped 1% YoY and 4% from the spring, indicating “initial signs of a slowdown,” Piper Sandler senior research analyst Edward Yruma noted in a statement. But there’s a significant gender gap.

Keep reading here.—EC

We’re starting the week with a friendly reminder to figure out what you’re going to be for Halloween, because if you didn’t want to DIY your Taylor Swift–Travis Kelce couples costume, it’s too late—they’re apparently sold out on 3 Wishes, an online Halloween retailer.

But not to get too ahead of ourselves, let’s dive into what’s going on in retail this week.

In openings: Wegmans Food Markets will open its first Manhattan store on Wednesday, finally replacing the Astor Place Kmart that closed its doors in July 2021. It will be Wegmans’s second New York City location—an 87,500-square-foot space in the East Village employing 600+ workers.

• The grocer signed a 30-year lease in the historic Wanamaker building at 770 Broadway, whose tenants include Yahoo, Facebook, Nielsen, and Verizon.

Kmart operated at that location for 25 years before empty shelves and dissipating vendor relationships led to its closure.

Keep reading here.—KM