The holiday shopping season in 2024 has been anything but typical in the U.S., as retailers have learned to adjust to near-constant disruptions to their supply chains, and falling inflation rates have brought much-needed relief to consumers.

The 2024 holiday shipping season was always going to be a difficult one for businesses, with just 27 days separating the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, five fewer than the same stretch last year, and four fewer than 2022. On top of that, retailers have encountered obstacle after obstacle all year long, from Houthi rebel attacks choking off shipping lanes in the Red Sea, to labor disruptions at East and Gulf Coast ports slowing the flow of products into the U.S. in October, the month when many consumers often look to start their holiday shopping. But through all those difficulties, businesses have learned to adapt. 

"Call it good luck or good management, retailers seem to be getting it right," says Jonathan Colehower, the managing director for global operations and supply chain practice at business operations consultancy company UST.

Early in the year, multiple concerns caused many retailers moving up shipments of products they planned to stock up on for holiday shoppers later in the year. That saw the peak shipping season that typically runs between August and October start in June, culminating in the third strongest month of all time for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in July. Following the November presidential election, companies then started to plan for a second Trump presidency, which has seen them again mobilize to bring shipments up, this time in anticipation of potential tariffs proposed by Trump against key trade partners such as China, Mexico and Canada.

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"Shippers and retailers weren't waiting around to see what happened," says Matt Muenster, the chief economist for freight optimization and transportation management company Breakthrough. And although the playbook retailers have traditionally abided by may not have radically changed, Muenster says that more pages have been added to it, as businesses have made contingency planning part of their norm. Colehower also points to the hard lessons many retailers learned from the pandemic years ago, which taught them just how important it is to quickly pivot away from traditional shipping timelines when they see trouble on the horizon.

With inventories stocked ahead of schedule, businesses have been able to roll out promotions earlier as well. Customer data from e-commerce platform Fast Simon found that traffic to e-commerce sites began spiking two to four weeks earlier than usual, with volumes reaching up to 38 times the norm before Black Friday. A survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) also found that 78% of respondents started their holiday shopping earlier than usual, half of whom cited early discount deals as their top reason.  

"We've seen quite a few brands that were trying to stagger their sales and really come ahead of the infamous Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend," Fast Simon CEO Zohar Gilad says, adding that some retailers were launching promotional deals up to a month before Black Friday this season.

On the consumer side, Muenster says that there's been "cautious optimism" among shoppers, with inflation rates between August and November falling to their lowest levels since early 2021, and wage growth outpacing inflation in each month dating back to January 2023. ICSC data also revealed that holiday shoppers are planning to spend more than $700 on gifts this year — the most since 2018 — while the National Retail Federation tracked 197 million shoppers between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, the second highest total the NRF has ever seen. 

"The indicators around the consumer are remaining relatively healthy, and ultimately, that's made for resilient spending into the holiday season," Muenster says.