By Andrew Smith is Director of Sales at ACI Transport For most of the past generation, retail organized itself around a single annual curve. The calendar moved through buying, build, peak and winddown, then restarted. Merchandising plans, labor schedules, store-level incentives and the logistics infrastructure underneath all of it were engineered for that single-curve business. What retail runs on now is two peaks stacked tightly enough that operations built for one will fracture under the other.