September 29, 2025
Your delivery network is about to get slammed, and Taboola’s crystal ball knows exactly when. While retailers prepare for a shopping surge that’ll turn your Tuesday trickle into Wednesday’s tsunami, inflation’s playing hide-and-seek in the middle mile. Meanwhile, Yellow Corp. just proved you can auction 58,000 trucks faster than you can pay the people who drove them as construction material costs go through the roof. But before you panic, consider this: Africa’s first mile has a lot of logistics efficiency nuggets everyone can learn from.
Buckle up.
Digital advertising giant Taboola just dropped its 2025 peak season predictions, and its experts are painting a picture that should have every retailer checking their shipping capacity twice.
Taboola’s research shows 22% of shoppers plan to spend more than last year, with the National Retail Federation projecting retail sales growth between 2.7% and 3.7% for 2025. But here’s where it gets spicy for delivery operations: The data reveals that holiday-themed campaigns convert at 4.4x the rate of generic ones, meaning if you’re a retailer nailing your seasonal messaging, you could get flooded with order volume spikes. Smart brands are already ramping up campaigns in Q3 to beat the rush, spreading that delivery demand earlier than ever.
Taboola’s growth marketing director, Eyal Shnaides, calls fixed budgets “outdated,” and the same logic applies to your driver network. Brands are reallocating resources based on real-time performance signals, which means Tuesday’s trickle becomes Wednesday’s tsunami without warning. Taboola’s omnichannel data show customers switch between channels, expecting that same flexibility from fulfillment. Gift cards topped 53% of wish lists last year, but physical goods still dominate, requiring actual trucks and actual drivers to deliver that “custom-made” experience.
July’s wholesale inflation jumped 0.9% when economists expected just 0.2%. But here’s the catch: Consumers haven’t fully felt it yet. Goldman Sachs found U.S. importers absorb 64% of tariff costs, foreign exporters eat 14%, and consumers pick up just 22% of the tab. So where’s all that inflation hiding? Right in the middle mile.
Retailers typically hit peak inventory mid-October, but tariff dodging has scrambled the playbook. Companies front-loaded freight to sidestep fluctuating tariffs, stuffing middle mile delivery with goods ordered two to three months ahead of schedule. Peak season merchandise now sits in limbo between ports and stores, turning distribution centers into overflow parking lots. Goldman predicts consumers will shoulder 67% of these costs by October, right when all that pre-positioned inventory finally hits retail floors.
The Fed just delivered a rate cut, but hidden middle mile inflation means your costs keep climbing while everyone expects cheaper everything. Your supply chain decisions right now determine whether you survive tomorrow’s pricing squeeze. So optimize your last mile networks today to dodge the capacity crunch when stored inventory floods forward and that hidden inflation begins to show its face.
Yellow Corp just pulled off the mother of all equipment liquidations — $175.7 million net from selling nearly 58,000 vehicles. At the same time, former employees wonder when they’ll see their vacation pay.
Yellow’s estate executed nearly 58,000 transactions that grossed $236.4 million from tractors, trailers, yard trucks, and forklifts. Auction houses Nations Capital, Ritchie Brothers, and IronPlanet pocketed $60.7 million for their troubles, while the estate’s cash pile swelled to $623 million (boosted further by selling 200+ service centers for nearly $2.4 billion). The October 2023 liquidation deals moved equipment faster than Black Friday TVs, proving that professional buyers know valuable rolling stock when they see it — especially when former competitors need to augment their fleets to handle Yellow’s orphaned freight.
While auctioneers counted commissions, thousands of former Yellow employees counted days waiting for their money. The Teamsters’ latest memo delivers reality: Workers might get anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a maximum $15,150 for priority claims (those within six months of bankruptcy). The union’s pursuing a WARN Act appeal that could add another $11,000 per worker, but MFN Partners keeps throwing wrenches at the bankruptcy plan ahead of November 5th’s confirmation hearing.
Construction materials are destroying budgets across the board. Prices ticked up 0.2% in August alone, pushing the year-over-year increase to 2.3% overall and 2.6% for nonresidential builds. Steel jumped 9.2%, copper wire surged 13.8%, and the gut punch? Overall inputs cost 44% more than it did in February 2020. ABC chief economist Anirban Basu says prices “rose at an especially rapid pace” for anything touched by tariffs, and contractors are getting crushed.
The damage spreads fast. Almost half of contractors (43%) watched at least one project die or shrink over the past six months because owners couldn’t stomach the bills. Desperate to stay afloat, two in five contractors hiked their own prices while 16% either swallowed the losses or begged suppliers to split the difference. Construction companies trucking materials to jobsites deal with constant price volatility, especially since 40% of contractors expect another wave of increases. AGC CEO Jeffrey Shoaf doesn’t sugarcoat it: There’s “a limit to how many price increases the market can absorb before owners put projects on hold.”
Stalled construction means manufacturers remain trapped in undersized facilities while industrial suppliers can’t build the warehouse space they desperately need. AGC chief economist Ken Simonson traces it back to “huge increases in steel and aluminum tariffs” that gave domestic producers free rein to gouge buyers. Contractors claim they’re “broadly optimistic” about profits over the next six months, but optimism won’t build your distribution center.
Forget everything you think you know about efficient logistics. Africa’s e-commerce market just hit $317 billion while dealing with roads that don’t exist on maps and suppliers that have never seen a barcode scanner. Despite this, Jumia and other African platforms deliver faster than your average two-day shipping promise and can teach many valuable lessons to the Western World about supply chains, from first mile pickup to last mile delivery.
Jumia serves Egypt’s 100 million people from a single 27,000-square-meter warehouse. Every product, every seller, every shipment flows through one facility positioned 2 kilometers from the central superhighway. Compare that to the typical American approach of spreading inventory across multiple distribution centers, each requiring its own staff, systems, and shuttle routes. The formula is surprisingly simple: Fewer buildings means fewer handoffs, and fewer handoffs means faster delivery. ALP’s Kenyan warehouse parks follow the same philosophy.
While everyone else races to eliminate human contact, African platforms purposely add more people to the equation. Jumia’s drop-off stations put actual humans between sellers and systems because teaching someone to use vendor software works better face-to-face than through FAQ pages. These stations handle 500 million emerging users who trust handshakes over passwords, and the same principle could remake American last mile logistics. Drivers already interact with customers at every stop anyway. So why limit them to dropping boxes when they could resolve issues, gather feedback, and build the trust that keeps customers coming back?
Peak season forecasts miss the mark, inflation hides in warehouse aisles, and truck auctions end faster than paychecks clear. Logistics just delivered a master class in volatility, while construction costs push steel prices past gold.
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