According to the MasterCard spending index:

U.S. retail sales excluding auto and gas grew 7.9% during the traditional Black Friday to Christmas Eve shopping season. The biggest winners this season were eCommerce and furniture, with double-digit growth, while electronics and men's apparel lagged well behind... eCommerce grew roughly 20% compared to last year. This is not a total surprise, as 70% of U.S. consumers report doing more research online than before...

According to Slice Intelligence, Amazon has dominated the holiday online spending consistently claiming in the mid-forty percent of overall eCommerce revenues.

And there were no systemic supply chain failures given the timing of Christmas and the absence of serious weather impacts involving dense population centers.

JANUARY 5 UPDATE:

Given the overall growth in retail sales, the holiday sales disappointments experienced by Macy's, Sears (and Kmarts) and Kohl's are especially significant.  Sears reports November and December sales were 12-13 percent less than last year. (!)

According to USA Today:

As temperatures plummeted, retailers' online traffic soared this past weekend as they entered the home stretch of the holiday shopping season. The last full weekend before Christmas and the start of Hanukkah proved to be a big winner for online shopping, with online traffic up 11% on Saturday, and 16% on Sunday, according to Verizon which tracked traffic on home-based Internet connections to the 25 largest U.S. online retailers

More on the Verizon Retail Index.

Tis the season to stress test last-mile delivery. One week remains till Christmas eve.

Friday, December 16 was FreeShippingDay, promoted as the last day to order and receive by Christmas without paying a premium.  I'm not yet seeing data on demand outcomes. Besides, there are still other options for "free" shipping.

Amazon is offering PrimeNow customers one or two hour delivery until midnight on Christmas eve.  Be sure to have milk and cookies to reward the poor guy/gal making last rounds.

Some suggest systemic problems have already emerged resulting in reduced on-time-delivery rates.  But UPS and FedEx insist that the network-as-a-network is meeting consumer expectations.

UPS expects to deliver more than 700 million packages this holiday season, a 14 percent increase over last year, US Postal Service anticipates a 12 percent increase and FedEx is forecasting a 10 percent increase.

My guess is that Sunday/Monday will see a peak for online orders. Anything shipped on Monday/Tuesday should make it home for the holidays. This temporal space between peak and target should support network efficacy.  This does not mean there won't be a last minute crisis.  Consumers are increasingly inclined to challenge the space-time continuum.

Lauren Freedman, senior vice president of digital strategy at Astound Commerce told the Wall Street Journal: "Holiday shoppers inevitably procrastinate... At the end of the day, they want to buy the stuff, and they want it fast. Now they just want it faster,”

MONDAY, DECEMBER 19 UPDATE:  USA Today has a good overview mostly repeating what is above... with a few more details.

In late November I was invited to Berlin to discuss food delivery in disasters.  There were eleven us from four different nations and several Germans.  

About eight years ago I began wondering -- worrying -- about the resilience of supply chains in major events: huge hurricanes, 7.0 plus earthquakes, pandemics and such.

Short of wide-area worst cases, I consider most contemporary supply chains to be self-healing. But I was not nearly as self-assured if and when the worst hazards involve the densest cities.

It seemed plausible to me that a combination of Just-In-Time disciplines, densities over 3000 persons per square mile, and increasing concentration at the distribution level could produce systemic fragility, especially when the electrical grid and telecommunications are out for several weeks.

So... if was especially interesting to meet in Berlin with others who have been looking at similar issues. We were a diverse bunch with varied experiences.  Our German hosts chose us partially to represent a diversity of views.  So we were all surprised to largely agree on the following outcomes:

1. Food supply vulnerabilities increase on the edge of demand and supply networks, especially when a dense population node (vertex) emerges at significant distance from other dense nodes (vertices). For example, Los Angeles is more vulnerable than New York City by virtue of the densities and distance of surrounding networks (among other reasons). 

2. Especially because of finding number 1, there is strategic value in identifying/ engaging sources of distribution capacity (contra retail capability) to assess and mitigate supply vulnerabilities before and during an extreme event. The distance and linkages and potential throughput of these system elements can reduce or increase vulnerability. 

3. There are crucial strategic and operational differences between urban (dense) and non-urban (non-dense) contexts in terms of food supply vulnerabilities. In both contexts, distance seriously complicates food supply resilience. But as density increases the impact of distance can be multiplied.

4. Supplying food to populations in transit (e.g evacuees departing or refugees flowing or emergency responders arriving) can be especially complicated. Distance and density are joined by velocity.

This interplay of density, distance, and velocity has been on my mind for awhile. But I had never before made a connection between my work in supply chain resilience and mass evacuation.

There will be an official report next year and I do not want to preempt it.  These are the shared take-aways I heard.  Others may have heard something a bit different.  

But to have entirely independent efforts reporting out findings that seem to corroborate my own findings has been very encouraging.  

Just-In-Time is not, per se, a source of greater fragility. A densely overlapping JIT network can, depending on its structure, be especially resilient.  But there are reasons to be concerned by islands of demand and supply that do not feature multiple connections with similar-sized proximate networks. The more dense the demand on such "islands", the more structural vulnerability.

Very nicely done piece from FiveThirtyEight (the Nate Silver site) focusing on the so-called Waffle House crisis indicator. Considerable attention to the Waffle House supply chain. Here's an excerpt:

“It’s a big deal for us to shut down, because we’re not used to turning everything off and turning the lights off and closing the door,” said Warner, who estimates that he has worked “more than 10” hurricane responses in 17 years. “So our goal is to open up as quickly as possible afterward. The operations team works with the distributor to get food ready to go in. The construction team lines up generators. If you have generators you have to have fuel, so we line up that.” 

On the edge of the predicted storm zone — which Stark monitors from a temporary “war room” assembled by putting mobile giant screens in a conference room — the company positions personnel who can swoop in: carpenters, electricians, IT specialists, a food-safety expert and someone to talk to local governments and law enforcement and soothe concerns about curfews. A little farther out, restaurants in other markets line up “jump teams”: spare personnel who volunteer to work in place of locals who might have evacuated or might need to repair their homes or care for family. In Hurricane Matthew, the company sent in an extra 250 people. 

“We say we throw chaos at chaos,” Mizell said.

Thanks to Lars for pointing me to this.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Some of the biggest food suppliers in the U.S. are responding to a threat from e-commerce trends by muscling their way into the market for home delivery of meal kits. The food heavyweights including Tyson Foods Inc., Campbell Soup Co. and Hershey Co. aim to build their own distribution channels straight to consumers, the WSJ’s Kelsey Gee reports, and stem the loss of business as consumers shift away from packaged foods. The companies are working with online couriers to challenge companies like Blue Apron and HelloFresh that have carved out a $1.5 billion market delivering parcels of fresh ingredients and snappy recipes to homes. Experts warn that the market for “Uber for food” is crowded, however, and littered with failures. The mass-market companies have deep pockets, but they’ll have to figure out how to manage their new, highly tailored deliveries for consumers alongside traditional supply chains built for scale.

Above: Banana boat on the Amazon (the original) River

According to the Seattle Times:

Call it Amazon.com’s driverless store.

The tech giant has built a convenience store in downtown Seattle that deploys a gaggle of technologies similar to those used in self-driving cars to allow shoppers to come in, grab items and walk out without going through a register. 

The 1,800-square-foot store, officially dubbed “Amazon Go,” is the latest beach in brick-and-mortar retail stormed by the e-commerce giant, which already has bookstores and is working on secretive drive-thru grocery

In October Business Insider reported:

Amazon wants to open 20 brick-and-mortar grocery stores over the next two years, and the online retailer believes the US market has room for up to 2,000 of its Amazon Fresh-branded grocery stores over the next decade... Amazon is planning to operate a 20-location pilot program for its grocery stores by the end of 2018, in places like Seattle, Las Vegas, New York, Miami, and the Bay Area.

Amazon is a retail revolutionary, not just an online-retail pioneer.  It is reconceiving -- and rebuilding -- how demand is expressed and supplies are distributed/delivered.  As barges and boats once (still) use rivers, Amazon is creating its own digital stream.