This will be an unpredictable holiday season, Mastercard warned in its holiday spending outlook for 2024.

Retailers will need to woo both the “value-conscious consumer” stretched by economic pressures, as well as the “confident consumer” who feels more easy to spend, Mastercard noted. That’s why finding unique and innovative ways to reach shoppers will be crucial.

Retail Brew sat down with Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, to do just that. Goldberg discussed ways in which retailers may serve as sources of inspiration to fend off competition during the busiest shopping season of the year.

How can retailers like Walmart spark inspiration in their customers’ shopping experiences?

I’m going to start in-store because of an analogy. When you think of a traditional store, you often have a lot of inventory on the shelves, which is kind of the base-level shopping experience. But then the way you generally spark inspiration and joy is in front of those shelves. You have what we call feature displays. So, an apparel store might have a shelf full of shirts, but they have a shirt dressed on a mannequin in front of that shelf. That mannequin is the featured display, and that shelf is the catalog of shirts, if you will.

So when you think about digital, we need the digital equivalent of those feature displays. Sometimes, that’s simply showing hot products or aspirational products, or products centered on these intermediate shopping pages, like category pages or department pages. But I think of it as more these new, novel experiences that our retailers are creating.

Keep reading here.—VC

A new National Retail Federation (NRF) study this week found that president-elect Donald Trump’s proposed import tariffs could cut US consumers’ spending power by $46–$78 billion, or $362–$624 per household, every year they’re in effect.

Trump has proposed 10%–20% tariffs on foreign country imports and 60%–100% tariffs on imports from China in an effort to boost domestic manufacturing. The NRF study analyzed the proposed tariffs’ potential impact across six retail categories—apparel, toys, furniture, household appliances, footwear, and travel goods (like purses and luggage)—concluding that subsequent costs would be “too large for US retailers to absorb,” and be passed along to consumers.

“A tariff is a tax paid by the US importer, not a foreign country or the exporter,” NRF VP of Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold noted in a statement. “This tax ultimately comes out of consumers’ pockets through higher prices.”

Keep reading here.—EC

Consider your latest trip to the grocery store, when you were greeted with row upon row of snacks that all fall under General Mills’s banner, and you can get a sense of the robustness of the snack food giant’s supply chain.

Or you can take it from Dave Jackett, senior director of digital supply chain transformation at General Mills.

“We deal with 20,000 suppliers every single year. They ship raw materials to 250 production locations around the world. We’ve got millions of customer orders every year shipping to over 10,000 customers. So it’s relatively complex,” Jackett said at Gartner’s recent Supply Chain Planning Summit in London, adding that the company’s supply chain unit counts 18,000 employees.

Not shocking, then, that even minor supply chain investments can produce major ROI—and General Mills’s supply chain digitization journey is productive food for thought for CFOs considering the potential payoffs of supply chain investments at their own companies.

Keep reading here on CFO Brew.—NP