The $90 Jacket That Isn't There: Retail's Spring/Summer Inventory Problem

After attending NRF Big Show earlier this year and EuroShop more recently, it’s clear that retailers aren’t short of ideas. They’re focused on what actually works, consistently, across stores, day in and day out, and that shift points to a broader reality the industry has been circling for some time.

Retail’s biggest challenge is execution and it often comes back to inventory.

A Small Failure That Happens at Scale

Take a simple, everyday example. A customer orders a $90 jacket online and chooses to pick it up in-store. The app shows it as available, the store system shows it as available, but when they arrive, the item isn’t there.

Somewhere between the stockroom, the shop floor, a return that wasn’t fully processed or an item that simply disappeared, that jacket no longer exists in the place the system thinks it does. The sale is lost, so it feels like a failure.

When you step back, this is happening at scale thousands of times a day across U.S. retail and that’s where it starts to become something else entirely.

The Store is Still the Center of Everything

What makes this more complex is that, on the surface, retail has never been more capable.

U.S. e-commerce continues to grow, with more than $316 billion spent online in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone. Omnichannel services are now standard and stores have evolved into fulfillment hubs, supporting everything from click-and-collect to ship-from-store, while still serving customers on the floor.

For all that progress, the fundamentals still haven’t changed. More than 83 percent of U.S. retail sales still happen in physical stores, which means the store is no longer just part of the model — it is the model. It’s where digital demand, physical experience and operational complexity all meet.

This is why inventory accuracy has become so critical. When stores are trying to serve both walk-in customers and digital demand at the same time, even small inaccuracies don’t stay contained. They ripple outwards into missed sales, broken promises and inefficiencies that are hard to trace and increasingly difficult to absorb.

The Spring/Summer Season is Where the Problems Settle in

One of the things that became clear at both NRF and EuroShop is that this is becoming a more urgent problem. Spring/summer, in particular, tends to bring this into focus in a quieter way.

Unlike peak season, where pressure exposes issues quickly, these months allow them to settle into the day-to-day. A size missing here, a product in the wrong place, a delivery that hasn’t quite been processed correctly, or a return that never fully makes its way back into available stock.

Globally, retailers are still losing around $1.7 trillion each year to inventory distortion, and what’s striking is how much of that loss is still driven by strategy.

The Cost of Being ‘Almost Right’

That gap shows up in ways that don’t always get captured cleanly, such as cancelled buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) orders because items can’t be found; split shipments because stock isn’t where it’s expected to be; store associates spending valuable time searching for products that aren’t there; or markdown decisions being made based on stock that doesn’t actually exist. Individually, these operational inefficiencies shape store performance.

As online demand continues to grow, now accounting for more than 16 percent of total U.S. retail sales, the margin for error becomes smaller. The model simply depends more heavily on accuracy than it used to.

Why Shrink is Now Part of the Same Conversation

At the same time, retail theft has risen sharply. NRF data shows that shoplifting incidents were up 93 percent in 2023 compared to 2019, alongside a 90 percent increase in associated losses.

When inventory data isn’t reliable, retailers can’t clearly distinguish between what was sold, what was misplaced, and what was stolen. The picture becomes blurred and when that happens response is always delayed. Inventory visibility is increasingly being viewed as a control issue, not just an availability one.

The Store Has Changed Faster Than the Model

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a store environment that has changed significantly in a relatively short period of time. Today’s store is expected to do far more than it was originally designed for. It’s a shop floor, a fulfillment center, a returns hub and, in many cases, a mini distribution point, all at once.

Many retailers are still relying on periodic counts, partial visibility and manual interventions to maintain inventory accuracy. Labor is also under pressure, costs are rising, and store teams are being asked to do more with less because there simply isn’t the time to go looking for problems. And even when there is, by the time they’ve found it, they’ve often created five more.

From Periodic Checks to Continuous Visibility

At EuroShop in particular, there was a noticeable focus on how technologies like AI, computer vision, and autonomous systems can be scaled and embedded into day-to-day operations as part of a more connected, resilient infrastructure. The same applies to inventory and the question sits around how continuously you can understand it.

That’s where fixed, always-on RFID is starting to change the dynamic. RFID aligns with how retail now operates — always on and always moving.

Retailers can begin to see inventory as a live, continuous dataset and the knock-on effects of that are significant. Fulfillment becomes more reliable, availability improves, and loss can be identified and addressed earlier. Put simply, the system starts to behave the way it was always intended to.

What This Means for the Next 12 Months

The Spring/Summer season won’t necessarily expose this challenge immediately, but it will amplify it over time. By the time peak season returns, the difference between retailers that have addressed it and those that haven’t becomes much more visible.

The retailers that perform best will be the ones that have taken friction out of the model they already have and built confidence in how their operations run day to day.

In this industry, everything ultimately comes back to inventory and right now, in too many places, that foundation still isn’t as solid as it needs to be.

More often than not, this is what separates a promise made from a promise kept.

Peter Oram is CEO of PervasID, a technology company providing always-on RFID that gives retailers real-time, item-level inventory accuracy across stores and supply chains.