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By Alex Stark Flatten, Not Fall: Sticky Inflation, Freight Rates That Peaked but Won’t Retreat, Amazon’s Robot Arms, and the Barcode’s Long Goodbye No travel this week. I stayed in my little corner of Northeast PA and got in some morning walks with the…

By Alex Stark Right Number, Wrong Question: Walmart’s Robot Reality Check, Electric Rigs Versus $8 Diesel, the Holiday Returns Collision, and the Planner’s Most Important Skill Earlier this week, I traveled to one of our nationwide facilities in Maryland and joined our President and…

By Alex Stark Certainty Arrives Late: A Stronger Economy Than We Knew, a Holiday Season on Edge, El Niño as a Trust Opportunity, and Who Gets to Steer AI We’ve made it to Q4. This is it. The busy season is here across (all)…

By Alex Stark Go Looking: The OECD’s Depleted Buffers, Hormuz Repricing Your Contracts, a Trailer Surge Built on Deferral, and Operating Model Debt Fall officially arrived this week, so feel free to consume as many pumpkin-flavored items as you like without judgment. If you’re…

By Alex Stark You Can’t Automate a Mess: The Fed’s First Hike Since 2023, a Trillion-Dollar Holiday That’s Half Inflation, Capacity Tightening Again, and a Million Robots Earlier this week, our organization participated in the 2026 supply chain roundtable at Miami University’s Farmer School…

By Alex Stark Not More, Better Placed: A Peak Season That Refused to End, Nike’s Exit From the S&P 100, Target Shipping the AI, and What Grocery Catering Figured Out   Labor Day is in the books, and it feels like the wheel keeps…

By Alex Stark Costs Stopped Listening: A Bond Selloff, Capacity That Loosened While Prices Rose, Another 12% on the Last Mile, and Retailers Cutting Variety I think I’m mentally past summer and now fully in fall mode in my little corner of the supply…

By Alex Stark Before the Season Starts: Souring Expectations, a Record Diesel Low, the Panama Canal Cutting Transits, and Two Retailers Betting on Boring School activity is ramping up here in my little corner of the supply chain in the Northeast U.S. Fall sports…