The Holiday Rush Has a Way of Exposing Weaknesses
There are just 77 days until Christmas.
For most people, that means holiday shopping, travel plans, and family gatherings.
For distributors, it means something else entirely.
More orders. Tighter delivery windows. Seasonal inventory. Increased pressure on warehouse teams. And customers who have less patience for mistakes because they have deadlines of their own.
The challenge isn’t simply moving more product. It’s maintaining the same level of accuracy and service when the operation is moving faster than usual.
A mislabeled carton that might take an hour to resolve in July can become a much bigger problem in December. A missed shipment can leave a retailer without critical inventory. An incorrect pick can trigger returns, expedited freight, additional labor, and an uncomfortable conversation with a customer.
And when these problems occur repeatedly, the cost adds up quickly.
The National Retail Federation forecasted that U.S. holiday retail sales would surpass $1 trillion in 2025, growing between 3.7% and 4.2% over the previous year. Its broader 2026 retail outlook projects another 4.4% increase in annual sales, reaching approximately $5.6 trillion.
These are retail forecasts, not direct measures of warehouse volume, but they illustrate the scale of demand moving through the supply chain.
For wholesale and convenience distributors supporting that demand, the coming weeks offer an opportunity to address operational weaknesses before they become seasonal emergencies.
Here are five areas worth evaluating now.
1. Get Inventory Accuracy Right Before Volume Increases
Few things slow a warehouse faster than inventory that isn’t where the system says it should be.
An employee arrives at a pick location expecting twelve cases and finds eight. The remaining inventory may be in reserve storage, sitting in an unconfirmed receiving location, or simply recorded incorrectly.
Now someone has to investigate.
During a normal week, that interruption is frustrating. During peak season, it can delay multiple orders, pull supervisors away from other responsibilities, and create additional work throughout the facility.
Inventory accuracy becomes especially important when distributors are handling seasonal products, promotional inventory, and higher-velocity items.
What to do now:
Conduct targeted cycle counts on high-volume and seasonal SKUs rather than waiting for a full physical inventory.
Review locations with recurring discrepancies and determine why those errors keep happening.
Confirm that receiving, putaway, replenishment, and picking transactions are being recorded when the work occurs.
Identify products with unusually high adjustment rates or repeated stockouts despite reported availability.
A warehouse management system can help by maintaining real-time inventory visibility and directing employees through consistent workflows.
But technology alone doesn’t guarantee accuracy.
The objective is to make sure the physical inventory and the information in the system agree before demand puts additional pressure on both.
2. Reduce Picking Errors Without Slowing Everyone Down
Picking accuracy is one of the clearest measures of warehouse performance.
It is also one of the easiest areas to compromise when employees feel pressure to move faster.
The challenge is that picking mistakes rarely end at the pick location.
An incorrect item may travel through packing, staging, loading, transportation, and customer receiving before anyone identifies the problem.
By then, correcting the error is considerably more expensive.
Warehouse research commonly identifies order picking as one of the most labor-intensive activities in distribution, with travel consuming a substantial share of picking time. A 2026 warehouse storage optimization guide from Reynolds Business Systems cites commonly used industry estimates that order picking represents approximately 55% of warehouse operating costs, with travel accounting for roughly 55% of picking time.
Those figures vary by facility and operating model, but the underlying point is important: reducing unnecessary travel and confusion can improve productivity without asking employees to work faster.
What to do now:
Review the placement of fast-moving seasonal inventory and relocate high-demand SKUs closer to efficient pick paths.
Verify that location labels, product identifiers, and barcode scanning processes are working consistently.
Identify the items most frequently mispicked and determine whether packaging, labeling, or adjacent locations contribute to the problem.
Add verification at high-risk points rather than creating unnecessary checks for every transaction.
For convenience distributors, this is particularly relevant when similar-looking products, multiple pack sizes, and frequent promotional changes create opportunities for confusion.
The goal isn’t to slow the operation down with more inspections.
It’s to make the correct pick easier to execute the first time.
3. Prepare Your People, Not Just Your Inventory
Peak-season planning often focuses on product availability, transportation capacity, and order forecasts.
Employee readiness deserves just as much attention.
Seasonal workers, temporary staffing, overtime, and shifting responsibilities can introduce additional variability into an already complicated environment.
Experienced employees may know exactly how to handle an unusual order, a damaged label, or a missing item.
New employees may not.
That difference becomes especially important when supervisors are managing increased volume and have less time to resolve individual questions.
In its 2025 holiday outlook, the National Retail Federation projected that retailers would hire between 265,000 and 365,000 seasonal employees. While that estimate applies to retail rather than warehouse hiring, it illustrates the broader seasonal demand for labor across the fulfillment ecosystem.
For distributors, the practical takeaway is to make processes easier to understand and execute consistently, regardless of employee tenure.
What to do now:
Review standard operating procedures for receiving, picking, packing, and shipping.
Identify tasks that depend heavily on experienced employees remembering undocumented steps.
Provide short, role-specific training for seasonal and reassigned workers.
Make escalation procedures clear so employees know what to do when a transaction doesn’t match expectations.
Cross-train employees in critical functions before staffing becomes strained.
This is where system-directed workflows can make a meaningful difference.
When a WMS tells an employee where to go, what to scan, and what to confirm, the operation becomes less dependent on memory and individual experience.
That consistency is valuable all year.
During the holidays, it becomes even more important.
4. Find the Exceptions That Are Already Costing You Time
Most warehouse operations have a handful of problems everyone knows about.
The supplier whose labels never scan correctly.
The customer who regularly changes orders after release.
The SKU that is consistently stored in the wrong location.
The manual paperwork that delays shipping confirmation.
The last-minute order that requires a supervisor to interrupt the normal workflow.
These issues may seem manageable during slower periods because experienced employees know how to work around them.
But higher volume has a way of exposing the true cost of those workarounds.
An exception that requires five minutes of manual intervention becomes more significant when it occurs dozens of times per day.
For example, 40 exceptions requiring five minutes each consume more than three labor hours in a single shift.
Across a six-day operating week, that’s 20 hours spent resolving issues rather than moving product.
And that calculation doesn’t include downstream delays.
What to do now:
Ask warehouse supervisors to identify the five most common operational exceptions.
Review which problems require manual data entry, supervisor approval, or repeated employee intervention.
Determine whether those exceptions originate with supplier data, warehouse processes, system configuration, or customer requirements.
Prioritize fixes based on frequency and operational impact rather than inconvenience alone.
The objective isn’t to eliminate every exception before Christmas.
It’s to address the recurring problems that are most likely to become bottlenecks when the warehouse is operating at capacity.
A relatively small process improvement today can prevent hours of avoidable work later.
5. Measure Accuracy Alongside Speed
When holiday demand increases, it’s natural for distribution leaders to focus on throughput.
Orders shipped.
Lines picked.
Cases moved.
Trucks loaded.
Those metrics matter.
But they don’t tell the whole story.
A warehouse can ship more orders while simultaneously creating more rework, returns, customer complaints, and transportation expense.
That’s why peak-season performance should include both productivity and accuracy.
One useful measure is perfect order performance, which evaluates whether orders are delivered on time, complete, undamaged, and with accurate documentation.
Consider a simple example.
If a distributor performs at 98% accuracy across four independent perfect-order components, the combined perfect-order rate would be approximately 92.2%.
That is a mathematical illustration, not an industry benchmark, but it demonstrates how small weaknesses across multiple steps can compound.
Even strong individual metrics can produce a less impressive customer experience when considered together.
What to do now:
Monitor order accuracy, on-time shipping, inventory discrepancies, and customer-reported errors alongside throughput.
Review performance daily during peak periods rather than waiting for monthly reports.
Identify whether errors increase during particular shifts, order types, or periods of high activity.
Track the time required to correct mistakes, not just the number of mistakes themselves.
Make performance information visible to supervisors while there is still time to act.
The objective isn’t another dashboard.
It’s giving the people running the operation enough information to recognize a problem before it becomes a pattern.
The Best Time to Fix a Warehouse Problem Is Before the Rush
The holiday season has a way of revealing what works and what doesn’t.
Processes that depend on memory become harder to manage. Inventory discrepancies create longer delays. Manual workarounds consume more labor. And mistakes that might otherwise be resolved quietly can begin affecting customers directly.
Fortunately, not every improvement requires a major technology investment.
A better slotting decision, a more reliable scanning process, a clearer exception workflow, or a focused cycle-counting effort can make a meaningful difference.
For distributors considering larger improvements to their ERP, WMS, or warehouse automation capabilities, the same principle applies.
Start by understanding where the operation is struggling and why.
At Sequoia Group, we’ve spent more than 30 years helping wholesale distributors, convenience distributors, and logistics providers improve the way their warehouses operate. We believe technology works best when it supports a well-understood process and makes employees’ jobs easier, not more complicated.
With fewer than 100 days until Christmas, there’s still time to strengthen the operation before the busiest weeks arrive.
And the improvements you make now can continue paying dividends long after the holiday season ends.
Because the goal isn’t simply to move more orders this holiday season. It’s to get more of them right the first time.
If you’re evaluating your warehouse processes, technology, or operational readiness, Sequoia Group can help identify practical opportunities for improvement.
