Agile Brand sees slower holiday sales growth and lighter hiring this season

The Agile Brand’s 2026 holiday shopping outlook calls for U.S. retail sales growth of 3.0% to 3.5%, below the consensus range, with inflation lifting spending more than unit demand. The free tracker will update through the season and score forecasts against official and industry data in January 2027.

Why it matters: - The outlook points to a holiday season where consumers spend more in dollar terms but buy less in real terms. - The forecast also suggests holiday hiring and online shopping behavior may be weaker and more uneven than many major forecasters expect. - The tracker is designed to compare predictions with actual results, which could sharpen the debate over who gets holiday retail trends right.

What happened: - The Agile Brand released its 2026 holiday shopping predictions, calling for U.S. holiday retail sales to rise 3.0% to 3.5% during November and December. - The forecast sits below the 4.1% to 5.5% range expected by most major forecasters. - The predictions are posted on The Agile Brand's Holiday Shopping Tracker, which will be scored in January against government and industry data used to evaluate the National Retail Federation, Adobe, Mastercard, Bain & Company and others. - Greg Kihlström, founder of The Agile Brand, said the tracker was built to compare predictions with what actually happened and to hold the company’s own forecast to the same standard.

The details: - Total holiday sales are projected to grow 3.0% to 3.5%, or about $1.0 trillion, using the National Retail Federation’s November-to-December definition and U.S. Census data. - The National Retail Federation forecasts 4.2% growth. - Real holiday sales growth after inflation is expected to land between 0.5% and 1.5%, below last year’s 1.7%. - Higher prices, not more purchases, are expected to account for most of the season’s growth. - Seasonal retail hiring is expected to come in below 360,000, which would trail 2025’s 362,600 and mark the fewest seasonal hires since 2008. - The hiring figure uses the Bureau of Labor Statistics October-to-December change in retail employment. - AI-referred traffic to retail websites is expected to rise faster than Adobe’s 130% forecast. - AI agents are expected to complete fewer than 3% of holiday online orders. - The tracker follows seven consumer shopping agents: Meta Muse, Alexa for Shopping, Google, ChatGPT, OpenAI Dots, Perplexity and Copilot. - Several of those agents cannot be captured by standard web-traffic tools.

Between the lines: - The data suggests consumers are entering the season cautious, with weak sentiment, high gasoline prices and lower savings. - University of Michigan consumer sentiment ended October at 48.0, the lowest pre-season reading in the tracker’s history. - Gasoline averaged $4.20 a gallon, the highest pre-season level in the data. - The personal saving rate fell to 3.8% in September, the lowest since November 2022. - The tracker says holiday sales have not grown in real terms since 2021, when adjusted for overall inflation. - The forecast also highlights how hard it is to measure AI shopping activity, especially when shoppers research with AI but still complete purchases themselves. - 39% of holiday shoppers call generative AI a primary shopping tool, according to Deloitte. - Among likely Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers, 43% would let an AI tool find the best price, but only 4% would let it complete a purchase without asking first, according to YouGov. - The release also shows why “online sales” can vary by source: for the 2025 season, Census fourth-quarter e-commerce was $365 billion, Census nonstore sales for November and December were $274 billion, and Adobe’s November-to-December online figure was about $253 billion. - The tracker says NRF forecasts have missed the actual Census-based growth range in each of the past nine seasons since 2017.

What's next: - The Holiday Shopping Tracker will update throughout the season and link each number to its source. - The Agile Brand Guide will publish a scorecard in January 2027 comparing its own predictions with those of other forecasters. - The free tracker will continue to rank forecasts against actual results dating back to 1992.

The bottom line: - The holiday season may still grow, but the growth looks more price-driven than volume-driven, with AI changing how shoppers research before it changes how they buy.