The Old Peak Playbook Is Not Enough
For years, peak preparation has largely meant adding more: more labour, more stock, more devices and more planning. But more people cannot compensate for poor processes, and more stock cannot fix inaccurate inventory data.
Adding resources doesn’t remove the friction already built into your operation. The retailers that perform best under pressure aren’t always the ones that throw the most resources at peak. They are often the ones that have removed the most friction in the following areas beforehand:
Labour and Productivity
Peak puts pressure on every minute. It’s a good test of whether your processes are genuinely efficient, or whether experienced colleagues are simply good at working around the inefficiencies. Before adding more hours, it’s worth looking at where time is being lost.
How much time is spent on manual processes? Searching for information, repetitive administration, unnecessary walking, chasing stock, following up with colleagues, and correcting avoidable errors.
During quieter periods, these may feel like manageable inefficiencies. But during peak, every wasted minute is multiplied. Temporary colleagues make this particularly visible. They don’t have years of experience to rely on or an instinctive understanding of “how we do things here”. If a task depends on tribal knowledge, workarounds or extensive training, peak will expose the problem quickly.
Look at where technology can remove unnecessary workflow steps, make information easier to access and help colleagues complete tasks faster. The simpler the process, the less reliance on individual experience to keep things moving.
Simplifying everyday tasks by putting the information and tools colleagues need at their fingertips is central to our Retail IQ platform; colleagues can access information such as product details, stock levels, pricing and product locations, helping them make decisions in the moment and respond quickly to customer queries.
This becomes particularly valuable during peak, when the operation has less capacity for workarounds, and every additional step takes time. The goal is to make every colleague as effective as possible with the time that they have.
Availability and Stock Accuracy
Having stock in the building is not the same as having it available to the customer. That gap becomes much more commercially significant during peak. More sales means more stock movement, more replenishment and greater pressure on back-of-house operations. A small inventory inaccuracy that might go unnoticed another day can mean missed sales when demand is high.
Retailers should be asking:
- Can colleagues trust the stock information they are seeing?
- How quickly can stock move from delivery to the shop floor?
- How much time is being spent searching for products?
- Are replenishment decisions based on accurate information?
- Can technology identify availability gaps before they become customer-facing problems?
Peak does not give stores more room for uncertainty. If a product is selling faster than expected, the ability to identify the gap and act quickly can be the difference between making the sale and losing it.
This is where Availability Checker can help. It analyses stock and sales data to identify products that appear to be in stock but are not selling as expected, highlighting potential gaps between the stock file and what is actually available on the shelf. Colleagues can then work through prioritised checks to verify the stock, address the issue and update the record. That means store teams can focus their time on the products where improving availability is likely to have the greatest commercial impact, rather than relying on generic stock checks.
If you want to find out more about what Availability Checker can do, watch our video or take a read of our blog to understand The Hidden Cost of Poor Stock Availability in Retail – and How to Fix It.
Pricing and Promotions
Peak puts pricing execution under pressure in a way that few other promotional periods do.
Black Friday, seasonal promotions, markdowns and last-minute additions can mean more price changes, more promotional mechanics, more shelf-edge labels and more exceptions. All while colleagues have less time to execute them.
A missed or incorrect price change can quickly become a customer-facing issue, a compliance risk or impact margin. Ecommerce only makes the pressure on in-store pricing even greater, with promotions and pricing needing to remain aligned across channels.
The questions are practical:
- How much colleague time goes into managing price changes?
- How easy is it to identify what needs changing?
- How quickly can exceptions be resolved?
- Can temporary colleagues execute pricing processes confidently?
- What happens when promotional activity changes at short notice?
The more manual the process, the harder it becomes to maintain accuracy at speed.
Technology such as Electronic Shelf Labels automates price changes, while Label IQ enables fast, efficient shelf-label and pricing workflows, and Price Verification helps retailers check that pricing is accurate and compliant.
To read more about how ESLs can support your retail business, take a look at our blog: Electronic Shelf Labels for Retail.
Task Prioritisation
Peak creates a fundamental operational problem. When everything is urgent, what actually comes first?
Adding more tasks to an already stretched team does not solve that problem. Colleagues need to know which actions will have the greatest customer or commercial impact, and they need that information quickly. This is where technology can move stores from “here is everything that needs doing” to “here are the things that matter most right now”.
That could mean identifying an availability gap, highlighting a high-demand product that needs replenishing, prioritising a time-sensitive promotion or directing colleagues to areas where stock accuracy is most at risk.
The aim is not to give stores another list to work through. It’s to give colleagues better information about where their time will make the biggest difference. Tools such as Availability Checker provide data-led visibility of stock accuracy and availability gaps, while Batch Print can support planned and future pricing and promotional activity. Together, these kinds of solutions help stores make better decisions about what needs attention first.
Omnichannel Demand
There’s another layer of demand that often gets overlooked in peak planning: the work happening behind the scenes to fulfil digital orders.
Stores are no longer only serving the customer standing in front of them. During peak, colleagues may also be picking online orders, preparing click and collect orders, processing returns and locating inventory – often while continuing to serve the shop floor.
These tasks create competing priorities. The colleague helping an in-store customer may also be in the middle of finding an online order. A product that appears available in the system may need to be located before it can be picked. And when stock information is inaccurate, the time required to fulfil digital demand increases further.
This makes accurate stock information and efficient replenishment even more important. Availability Checker, Shelf Replenishment and Stock Count can help give stores greater visibility of what is actually available, helping reduce the friction between physical and digital demand.
Peak doesn’t have to make omnichannel operations harder. But it can make the consequences of poor visibility and inefficient processes harder to ignore.
Technology Resilience
Technology only improves productivity if it works when colleagues need it.
Peak is the worst possible time to discover that devices no longer hold charge, spare batteries are unavailable, printers are failing, connectivity is unreliable, or applications are slow. Add colleagues who are unfamiliar with the equipment, and even the smallest of technology issues can quickly become operational problems.
This makes technology resilience part of peak readiness, not just an IT checklist. The question is simple: could your store operation continue smoothly if demand increased dramatically tomorrow?
A pre-peak review should look beyond whether devices technically work:
- Are there enough devices for the workload?
- Are batteries and printers ready?
- Are applications configured correctly?
- Do temporary colleagues know how to use them?
- When something does fail, how quickly can it be resolved?
We can support you with additional mobile devices and printers where required, alongside TotalSupport Swap service to help minimise disruption when equipment fails. The goal is not zero technology issues. It’s an operation that can recover quickly without issues becoming a bottleneck.
Communication and Colleague Safety
Peak also changes the environment colleagues are working in. Stores are busier, footfall increases, temporary colleagues may be unfamiliar with the layout, and teams are dealing with more activity, more stock and more unknowns. That makes fast communication and easy access to support an operational and safety issue.
The scale of seasonal staffing can be significant. In 2025, the John Lewis Partnership launched its biggest-ever seasonal recruitment campaign, recruiting 13,700 temporary colleagues across its stores, distribution centres and supply chain, including 11,500 roles across John Lewis and Waitrose shops.
Peak generally sees stores managing larger teams, with unfamiliar colleagues, at the point when there is less time for lengthy training or explaining complicated processes.
Colleagues may need to communicate quickly across a large or busy store, contact a manager or security, escalate an incident or support a temporary colleague. The challenge is doing that without adding yet another complicated process to an already pressured environment.
When peak increases the pressure on your operation, keeping colleagues connected is part of keeping the operation moving. Push-to-talk technology, enabled by mobile computers, can give colleagues a simple way to stay connected while continuing to work. For busy stores, that can mean faster communication, quicker escalation and less time spent trying to find the right person.
Post-Peak
Peak does not end when Christmas does. For stores, the period after the main trading spike creates a second operational wave: returns need processing, markdowns need executing, excess inventory needs managing and unsold promotional stock needs a home.
There is also the gradual wind-down. Seasonal products need to be phased out of replenishment, temporary colleagues need to be offboarded, and stores need to move from peak processes back towards business as usual.
In other words, peak is not a single spike. It has a tail.
That makes planning the comedown just as important as planning the build-up. Without the right visibility, the same issues that caused pressure during peak continue into January. These challenges can tie up colleague time, create unnecessary stockholding and make it harder to return to normal operations.
The good news is that the visibility needed to manage peak can also help retailers manage the aftermath. Accurate stock information can support decisions around excess and seasonal inventory. Clear task priorities help teams work through returns and markdowns. Efficient processes can make the transition back to normal trading less disruptive.
The aim should be to come out of peak with an operation ready to move forward, rather than dealing with the consequences of the previous weeks.
What Peak Actually Reveals About Your Operations
Peak is more than a period of exceptional demand. It shows where your operation can absorb pressure, and where it relies on workarounds, additional resources, or experienced colleagues to keep things moving.
That makes the run-up to peak an opportunity to ask better questions.
- Where are colleagues losing time?
- Where does stock accuracy break down?
- How quickly can stores respond to availability gaps?
- How easily can teams execute price changes?
- Which tasks compete for attention?
- Where does technology become a support or a barrier?
The retailers that come out ahead are not necessarily the ones that throw the most resources at peak. They’re the ones that use the run-up to find and remove friction before demand puts it under pressure.
Your goal should not just be to survive peak, but to build an operation that is better equipped to handle whatever it throws your way.
From stock accuracy and availability to pricing, productivity and task management, we can help identify where technology can remove unnecessary tasks and give your store teams better visibility and control. Ready to see what your operation could do differently? Get in touch with our team of retail technology experts.
