Key takeaways:
- Consumers have remained surprisingly resilient despite tariff uncertainty, fuel price shocks and geopolitical instability, though spending behavior is shifting in meaningful ways.
- GLP-1 drugs are reshaping product demand across categories well beyond food, with retailers adjusting assortments, store layouts and promotional strategies in response.
- AI investment is moving from experimentation to ROI accountability, with the most successful use cases centered on sales enablement and inventory management rather than headcount reduction.
What were the major stories impacting retail that defined the first half of 2026 and will continue affecting the second half of the year, including the all-important holiday season? And what strategies are retailers using to grow loyalty, enable sales and fuel success through the holiday season?
At Tuesday’s webinar hosted by Retail TouchPoints, Deborah Weinswig, CEO and founder of Coresight Research; Seth Estep, EVP and chief merchandising officer at Tractor Supply; Kristin Flor Perret, VP of brand at Sur La Table; and Neil Stern, CEO of Good Food Holdings, had a candid conversation about the forces shaping the industry and how they’re responding to them.
Miss the live session? Watch the replay here.
Affordability and GLP-1s: The Major Themes That Defined H1 2026
The panel painted a nuanced picture of the American shopper. Grocery units have declined for five consecutive months nationally, Stern said, and the situation is worse on the West Coast, where Good Food Holdings operates.
“The quote-unquote recession-proof area is not so recession-proof as consumers have a lot of other pressures on their checkbooks right now,” Stern said.
Yet affluent shoppers have largely held firm. Weinswig pushed back on the dominant K-shaped economy narrative, pointing to Coresight Research’s weekly consumer surveys, which she said have been running since January 2020. The net proportion of consumers expecting to spend more this holiday season hit 7.1% in June, the highest reading in all of 2026 and a significant rebound from a low of negative 1.6% in March.
At Tractor Supply, Estep observed the gap between core and occasional shoppers widen most sharply in May, when fuel prices spiked nationally.
“Core shoppers really respond to innovation, core essentials as well as price value,” Estep said. “More fringe shoppers were really making some choices around whether they’d make that extra trip.”
Flor Perret described Sur La Table’s customer as leaning toward luxury, noting the premium retailer didn’t feel the headwinds it had anticipated. More telling: demand for in-store cooking classes, priced between $99 and $129, held steady even as broader discretionary spending came under pressure.
“We would have thought that demand would have gone down, but people are replacing buying stuff with that experience,” she said.
Weinswig set the tone early, framing the rapid adoption of GLP-1 drugs for diabetes and weight loss as the headline story of H1.
“GLP-1 has impacted inventories in a way that retailers hadn’t expected, and they have also, we believe, under-ordered for the back half of the year,” she said. “From an inventory positioning perspective, it’s going to get really interesting as we move into holidays.”
Weinswig’s data showed that 72% of GLP-1 users dropped one clothing size or more, and 54% of those who tried the drugs purchased fashion, footwear or accessories. The ripple effects extended to Tractor Supply, where Estep noted women’s apparel had become one of its fastest-growing segments. Stern, whose stores include a location in Beverly Hills, said his high-adoption customer base is shifting toward fresh foods and protein and away from processed snacks.
Pet ownership is also an interesting trend worth watching. Weinswig reported that cat ownership in the U.S. grew from 40 million to 49 million households between 2023 and 2025, driven in part by multigenerational living. At Tractor Supply, that translated to expanded pet food sections, a rollout of fresh pet food to more than 700 stores and growing demand for backyard chickens and gardening supplies.
How Retailers Are Responding: The Must-Dos
Inventory Availability as a Loyalty Issue
With fuel costs making every shopping trip more deliberate, out-of-stocks carry heavier consequences. Weinswig framed on-shelf availability as a prerequisite for consumer loyalty, not just a sales metric.
Good Food Holdings uses Simbe Robotics technology to cycle its stores in real time, feeding inventory data directly to its ecommerce platform so customers can’t order items that aren’t physically on the shelf. Tractor Supply is piloting similar robot technology and launched a “stocked and ready” filter on its website, allowing customers to see depth of inventory and nearest store availability across hundreds of thousands of SKUs.
AI as a Sales Enabler, Not a Cost Cutter
Panelists broadly agreed that the more compelling return on investment has come from augmenting frontline staff, not reducing headcount.
Flor Perret offered a useful reframe for how retailers should evaluate AI adoption. “You shouldn’t have AI-first initiatives,” she said. “What’s the big unlock? What is the problem that has been so huge that’s looming out there that you’ve never been able to solve? Will AI help me with that?”
Both Stern and Flor Perret stressed the importance of data quality as a prerequisite, noting that unreliable inputs would produce unreliable outputs regardless of the sophistication of the model.
Weinswig noted that AI investments tied to search have delivered roughly a tenfold return, while employee enablement tools, including internal HR information systems, have reduced friction for staff and customers alike.
Tractor Supply’s “Hey Guru” tool allows store associates to query a voice-activated AI system for product recommendations based on real-time store inventory, built on what Estep described as the company’s internal selling methodology. Camera systems outside stores now notify team members when customers appear to be examining high-consideration items like zero-turn lawnmowers.
“We went from pilot to full deployment, and it’s amazing to see the acceptance from a lot of our frontline team members,” Estep said.
Investing in the Physical Retail Moment
Flor Perret noted a meaningful behavioral divergence between brick-and-mortar and online shoppers. In-store visitors arrive more intentionally and expect more.
“You make that investment to go to the mall or the store, you got in your car, you paid for the gas, you’re carving out that time,” she said. “So that’s a much more purposeful shopper. The stakes have never been higher, and that’s why a brand that is omni has an edge in this market right now.”
Holiday Outlook: Cautious Optimism with Real Uncertainty
What’s Still Up in the Air
Tariff volatility emerged as the most consistent source of concern heading into the back half. Flor Perret noted that prolonged uncertainty makes inventory planning difficult, particularly for retailers committing to buys months in advance. Fuel costs compound the problem, affecting last-mile delivery economics in ways that weren’t fully built into earlier business plans.
What the Data Suggests
Despite those headwinds, Weinswig’s consumer survey data points toward a more constructive holiday season than media coverage might suggest. With GLP-1 inventory under-ordering likely creating scarcity in certain categories, she argued retailers could see better margins and less promotional pressure than in recent years.
“We are going to have a holiday season where we do not see as much discounting as we have,” she said. “We see better margins for the retailers because we have a lack of inventory. It is setting up to be a very interesting holiday season, which could be very good for the retailers.”
Stern, for his part, acknowledged that consumer resilience isn’t guaranteed. “The consumer has been remarkably resilient,” he said. “All the things thrown at us on tariffs and gas price shocks and geopolitical issues, they’re out there and they’re spending money. But we have to earn that. It’s not going to be there easy for us.”
Estep said Tractor Supply is approaching the holiday primarily through the lens of execution: in-stock levels, program resets and staying closely connected to its loyalty database to monitor consumer sentiment in real time. Flor Perret added that for Sur La Table, the priority is maintaining brand investment at the top of the funnel even while running promotional activity, arguing that winning a customer on a doorbuster deal doesn’t build long-term loyalty.
“If I win that person on Black Friday and I get it because I have the doorbuster with the lowest cost, I’m not going to keep that customer,” she said.
