Top Retail News You Need to Know This Week

As retailers look toward 2026, this week’s retail news highlights an industry navigating higher tariffs, tighter margins, and more cautious consumers, while still pushing forward with meaningful change. 

• Forces shaping retail decisions this year: From Saks Global’s bankruptcy underscoring vendor vulnerability to Goodwill’s ecommerce growth driven by price-conscious shoppers, current retail conditions highlight how economic pressure is forcing practical changes to business models. At the same time, Amazon is beginning to reflect tariffs in pricing, influencing more cautious, deal-focused shopping behavior. Against that backdrop, NRF 2026 made one thing clear: AI, omnichannel execution, and operational efficiency are no longer experiments, but core requirements for competing in 2026.
• Walmart and Amazon play different games: Walmart’s fashion push is drawing higher-income shoppers, while Amazon is expanding both ultra-fast delivery in the UK and large-format physical retail in urban markets.

Keep reading this week’s retail news roundup to see how these pressures and strategies are setting the tone for retail in 2026.

Retail in 2025 Was a Stress Test, 2026 Will Reward Execution

The retail industry operated under relentless pressure in 2025. Tariffs, inflation, rising costs, and cautious spending forced uncomfortable reckonings. What emerged wasn’t collapse across the board, but divergence between companies with flexibility and those without, between value and premium models, and between tech experimenters and tech adopters. 

This week’s retail news captures that turning point clearly, from a luxury department store bankruptcy to the rise of resale, from tariff-driven price increases to the hard lessons reinforced at NRF 2026.

Vendor Relationships Are a Balance-Sheet Risk, Not a Given

The recent Saks Global bankruptcy illustrates how fragile wholesale relationships become when cash flow tightens. Entering Chapter 11 in early 2026 after a turbulent 2025, Saks faced billions in debt tied largely to its Neiman Marcus acquisition, alongside thousands of unpaid invoices, shrinking inventory, and deteriorating communication with vendors.

What stands out is the scale of vendor exposure. Court filings revealed Chanel is owed roughly $136 million, while Kering is owed close to $60 million. Footwear and accessories brands are also deeply affected: Christian Louboutin is owed $21.6 million, and Capri Holdings (parent of Jimmy Choo and Michael Kors) is owed more than $33 million. While these vendors have the financial resilience to endure a prolonged court process, smaller brands face significantly higher risk.

Saks’ leadership has been unusually direct about the implications. Chief Restructuring Officer Mark Weinsten told the court that Saks Global’s ability to generate revenue depends on a carefully hand-picked mix of third-party and private-label merchandise. Many of those vendors, he noted, are “irreplaceable” brands whose absence would fundamentally damage the retailer’s value proposition.

New CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck has promised to prioritize vendor payments, securing $1.75 billion in Chapter 11 financing and appointing senior leaders with deep luxury experience. However, even with court approval to put “certain critical vendors” (i.e., irreplaceable brands) first, recoveries will be uneven, and rebuilding trust will take time, particularly as foot traffic at Saks and Neiman Marcus has continued to decline while competitors like Bloomingdale’s posted gains.

The takeaway? Retailers learned in 2025 that vendor trust goes beyond relationship management, it’s fundamental to supply chain stability.

Value Wins When Cost Pressure Hits Consumers

At the opposite end of the retail spectrum, Goodwill shows how economic pressure can accelerate growth for value-based and circular models. Modern Retail reported that ShopGoodwill.com posted its strongest year ever in 2025, generating roughly $450 million in gross merchandise value (up 22% year-over-year) as inflation and tariffs pushed more shoppers toward secondhand goods.

What’s remarkable isn’t just the scale of growth, but how the business model works.

• Inventory is donation-based, not purchased.
• Fulfillment is distributed across 135+ local Goodwill stores.
• About 90% of each sale goes back to the local community that sourced the item.

This structure gives Goodwill a cost advantage over resale rivals like ThredUp or The RealReal, which must acquire, warehouse, and process inventory centrally. As consumers became more comfortable gifting secondhand items in 2025, resale shed much of its stigma and moved closer to the mainstream.

Tariffs Hit Amazon

At the same time, tariffs began showing up more directly at checkout. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy confirmed that the buffer stock many sellers relied on to hold prices steady has largely run out.

Sellers are now forced to choose between passing higher costs on to consumers, absorbing them and shrinking margins, or adjusting prices selectively. In a business that already operates on thin margins, none of those options offer much relief. Amazon reports that shoppers are still spending, albeit differently by trading down, hunting for deals, and hesitating on higher-priced discretionary items.

In short, higher prices changed the math for many consumers. In 2025, resale and repair moved from “nice in theory” to “makes sense right now.”

NRF 2026: The Industry Moves Past Experimentation

Against this economic backdrop, NRF 2026 delivered a consistent message: technology has moved beyond proof-of-concepts to become core infrastructure.

Key takeaways reinforced what many retailers found out the hard way in 2025:

• AI is moving into production, supporting forecasting, inventory planning, customer service, and even software development through natural-language prompting.
• Omnichannel execution has become a business necessity. Customers expect consistent pricing, inventory visibility, and fulfillment across digital and physical touchpoints.
• Speed matters with AI adoption. The risk isn’t moving too fast, it’s moving too slow

Economic pressure is making the gaps obvious. Disconnected systems, slow rollouts, and unclear digital ownership for customer data are becoming real obstacles, not background issues.

Walmart and Amazon Are Playing to Different Strengths

As retail leaders head deeper into 2026, the rivalry between Walmart and Amazon is becoming less about who is bigger and more about how each company chooses to grow. Recent updates show two different playbooks taking shape. Walmart is rebuilding credibility in categories it once underplayed, while Amazon is leaning into speed, infrastructure, and physical retail to extend its digital reach.

Walmart’s Fashion Strategy: Changing Perception Before Chasing Volume

For much of its history, Walmart fashion served a functional role: drive traffic, cover the basics, keep prices low. When retail exec Denise Incandela joined the company in 2017, that reality was stark. Walmart was strong in essentials like tees and denim, but it wasn’t capturing the rest of the customer’s wardrobe or their discretionary spending.

What followed was a deliberate effort to change perception, not just boost volume. That meant refreshing assortments, building real brands, and moving away from the long-standing “stack it high and watch it fly” mindset that had defined Walmart apparel for decades. 

The strategy is now delivering results. Since 2020, Walmart has launched or relaunched 10 private apparel brands, including Scoop and Free Assembly, positioning them as “elevated” labels priced largely between $15 and $40. These brands act as credibility builders, showing that Walmart can deliver fashion-forward products without abandoning affordability. The strategy has expanded to resale as well, with Walmart adding pre-owned luxury items through partnerships like Rebag.

What’s striking is who is responding:

• About 40% of Walmart Fashion customers now come from $100K+ households.
• Apparel sales grew more than 5% each month during Q3.
• Six Walmart-owned fashion brands now generate over $1 billion.

In-store changes have reinforced the shift. Walmart reduced clutter, created clearer zones for categories like denim and handbags, and added QR codes to extend assortment online. Just as important, the rollout has been paced carefully, Incandela told Fortune. Move too fast and risk alienating core shoppers; move too slowly and lose momentum. 

Walmart’s progress shows that perception change at scale is possible, but only through sustained investment and restraint. Retailers looking to move upmarket can’t rely on pricing alone. They need credible design, cohesive brand identities, disciplined merchandising, and the patience to let trust build over time.

Amazon’s Countermove: Speed, Proximity, and Physical Expansion

While Walmart works to earn fashion cred, Amazon is applying pressure in a very different way: by shrinking the distance between demand and delivery.

Amazon’s launch of Amazon Now UK brings 30-minute delivery of groceries and everyday essentials to parts of London, building on similar pilots in Seattle and Philadelphia. The model relies on smaller, strategically placed fulfillment sites closer to customers, reducing delivery time, improving efficiency, and supporting ultra-fast commerce without overloading traditional warehouses.

Here’s how Amazon aims to achieve quick commerce:

• A new 229,000-square-foot megastore in Chicago blends grocery general merchandise, and showroom elements.
• Stores double as fulfillment hubs and returns centers.
• Physical locations are treated as infrastructure, not just sales floors.

In many ways, the two retailers are swapping scripts, each borrowing strengths historically associated with the other.

Two Strategies, One Shared Reality

Despite different strategies, Walmart and Amazon are responding to the same pressures: shoppers want more choice, faster service, and better value.

Scale alone no longer wins but execution does, whether that’s Walmart attracting higher-income shoppers through improved design and in-store experience or Amazon using physical infrastructure to deliver speed and convenience.

Other Amazon Sellers News This Week

1. QuickBooks Online Now Embedded in Amazon Seller Central

Sellers can now connect QuickBooks Online directly inside Amazon Seller Central to track profit, fees, expenses, payouts, and inventory in one place. If you want clearer financial visibility across channels (and a free three-month trial), this is worth exploring now.

2. US SAFE-T Claim Window Shrinks to 30 Days

Starting February 16, 2026, Amazon is cutting the SAFE-T claim filing window in half for seller-fulfilled orders, aligning it with returns and A-to-Z timelines. Sellers should review older returns and refunds now to avoid missing reimbursement opportunities.

3. New Guidance for Managing Seller-Fulfilled Returns

Amazon outlined updated tools and best practices for handling FBM returns, including prepaid labels, returnless refunds, and fraud documentation. Sellers who manage their own fulfillment should revisit these workflows to reduce friction and protect margins.

4. Plan Your 2026 Shipping Strategy With Supply Chain by Amazon

Amazon is urging sellers to reassess fulfillment options from FBA and AWD to SFP, FBM, MCF, and Remote Fulfillment with FBA. Reviewing these choices now can help you balance cost, control, and Prime-level delivery heading into the new year.

5. Walmart and Wing Accelerate Drone Delivery Expansion

Walmart and delivery partner Wing are moving drone delivery into everyday use, starting in Houston with plans for 150 stores and reaching 40 million customers. Thousands of weekly autonomous deliveries show how fast last-mile expectations are rising, and why sellers should watch fulfillment trends for 2026.