94% of it happens live

Good morning.

Amazon's and Target's October deal events are less than two weeks out, making this the last quiet week you get.

This week: diesel set an all-time record, and your carrier invoice is next; tariff refunds are stuck in a queue that favors the biggest importers; brands are answering the AI discovery problem by signing store leases; and live selling turned out to be the whole business in one category nobody expected.

Let's get into it.

Diesel hit a national average of $6.51 a gallon on Monday, the highest price ever recorded. It broke the old record of $5.85 at the start of the month and has since climbed another 66 cents. The cause is closed shipping routes and a refining system with nothing left to give, which is not a problem that can be resolved on a schedule.

FedEx's domestic fuel surcharge is running at 32.25% and resets weekly. It's a percentage applied on top of your base rate, so the discount you negotiated last year doesn't reduce it. Carriers stopped absorbing these a long time ago.

Most of what you're selling in December is already sitting in a U.S. warehouse, so the expensive part of the holiday supply chain happened before this run-up. What's left is outbound, one package at a time, on every order you ship between here and Christmas.

Regular gas hit $4.37 a gallon last Wednesday, and part of why August retail sales looked strong was that gas stations were ringing up more dollars per gallon. Economists in that report flagged lower-income households as the ones who run out of room first. They're also the ones who abandon a cart when the shipping line moves.

Two things to do this week. Pull your carrier agreement and find the fuel surcharge clause, because some contracts cap it or peg it to an index, and most owners have never read theirs. Then decide whether you're eating the increase or passing it through, because deciding in mid-November means deciding badly.

The Supreme Court threw out the emergency-powers tariffs back in February. Seven months later, a good share of the money is still sitting between Customs and the courts.

Customs built a three-phase system to process the refunds, and which phase your entries fall into depends on whether they were liquidated, recently liquidated, under protest, or final. The filing window for the Customs process runs for 80 days. The protest window runs for 180 days. Entries that were already final may need a court order before anyone can touch them.

A case at the Court of International Trade runs roughly $10,000 to $15,000 in legal fees, which for a small importer is most of what they're owed. Chasing a $15,000 refund with a $10,000 legal bill is just a donation at that point.

Macy's collected $116 million and is spending it to cut prices on furniture and jewelry heading into the holidays. A brand importing forty containers a year is still waiting to find out which bucket its entries landed in.

Call your customs broker this week and ask a specific question: which of our entries were filed, under which phase, and which ones are final. A surprising number of small importers assume the broker handled it. Some did. Some didn't.

Fashion and beauty brands are shifting spending from search and display to stores, events, and people. Modern Retail talked to a group of them about why, and the answer was blunt: shoppers are starting to do product research inside AI tools, the old channels no longer convert the way they used to, and these brands went looking for places where the algorithm isn't the middleman.

Parties. Shopping nights with a charity tie-in. Face painting so parents stay another twenty minutes. One founder said their customer "is looking for a human. They want to touch, they want to feel." Another said the hardest part isn't rent, it's finding people you trust to run the place.

Pinterest rolled out Visual Search Ads and a wider set of AI ad tools the same week, dropping sponsored products straight into image searches. The pitch was no new creative required, and 96% of searches on Pinterest carry no brand name at all. That's a room full of people who know what they want and don't know who makes it.

A store is a lease, a payroll, and a five-year decision. A bad quarter of ads you can turn off on a Tuesday.

Ninety-four percent of the luxury resale revenue on TikTok Shop in the U.S. this year came from livestreams. The category is up roughly 400% over last year.

Nobody wants to spend four figures on a secondhand bag from a photo. On a livestream, the seller turns the bag over, shows the stitching, reads the serial number aloud, and answers the question, "Is that stain going to come out?" while forty people watch. TikTok's category lead described trust as something that requires a conversation, and the conversation is happening live.

Any product whose real objection is "is this legit," "will it fit me," or "is it worth that much" has the same problem, and video that answers in real time solves it in a way a product page never has. Resale got there first because its objection is the loudest.

Before you schedule a stream: one of the sellers in that piece gets 15% to 20% of total revenue from TikTok and live combined, which is a real line of business and also not a majority of anything. Treat it as a channel to learn, not a quarter to bet.

Costco is now a delivery app.
Nearly 600 warehouses went live on Uber Eats, and about 630 landed on DoorDash across 47 states. Costco has said that same-day delivery is growing faster than the rest of its digital business, and every membership club that does this trains its customers to expect two-hour delivery.

A Christmas supplier filed Chapter 11 in September.
Gordon Companies, which supplies seasonal decor to Target, Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, and Kohl's, filed on the 16th and blamed years of fallout from an inventory system that never worked. Worth a look if you share any vendors with them.

J.C. Penney opened a marketplace.
Sales fell by more than 8% last quarter, and the marketplace, which launched late in the quarter, is beating internal expectations. Furniture was up 41%. Another door for third-party sellers, opened by a retailer that needs the volume more than you do.

Walmart's data platform has improved, but still isn't for you.
Scintilla is adding marketplace data and a smarter AI assistant for first-party suppliers. Marketplace-only sellers remain locked out, with no plan to change that.

Kroger's online business made money again.
Digital sales rose 20%, and e-commerce was profitable for a second straight quarter, which is the harder number. We flagged their ad business last week; this is the other half of why grocery delivery stopped being a loss leader.

Creators booked their holiday calendars in July.
Brands started sending partnership requests over the summer, and TikTok Shop's holiday event on November 14 is the unofficial starting gun, meaning concepts and creative get locked in by September. If you're pitching creators in October, you're pitching leftovers.

Chewy's COO on last-mile.
Where a specialty retailer can still beat the giants on delivery, including one good line about what it means when a single complaint contradicts your aggregate data. Five-minute read. He ran fulfillment at Amazon before this.

That's the week.

If you do only one thing after reading this, open your carrier agreement and find out what your fuel surcharge is pegged to. It's the line item most likely to surprise you between now and January, and it's the only one on this list you can negotiate.

And if you need help finding a better or new 3PL, we’d love to help you at FulfillYN, the #1 3PL matchmaking service.

See you next Wednesday.