Tariffs Are the Next Trigger.
The Field Side Is Already Feeling It.

The Numbers Are Already on the Record

Carter's, the largest branded marketer of baby and young children's apparel in the U.S., just raised their store closure target from 100 to 150 locations. Their effective duty rate went from 13% to the high 30s. That is not a rounding error. The company estimates the annualized gross pre-tax impact of the additional import duties at $200 million to $250 million.

To absorb that, they are cutting 15% of their corporate workforce, roughly 300 positions. The CEO and the board of directors are voluntarily reducing their own compensation. When leadership starts cutting their own pay, the math is serious.

Orvis, a 169-year-old outdoor retailer, is shutting down 36 locations. 31 stores and 5 outlets, taking the company from more than 70 retail locations to 35. Their president called it an "unprecedented tariff landscape." The company is pivoting to wholesale, leaning on partnerships with 550 independent retailers and national chains like Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's. That is not a store optimization play. That is a company deciding the retail storefront model no longer works at their cost structure.

Coresight Research projects about 7,900 U.S. store closures in 2026. GameStop, Francesca's, and Walgreens lead the list. Moody's default watch is as long as it was last year. And this is before the full tariff impact works through the supply chain. Retailers front-loaded inventory shipments in early 2026 to beat the tariff deadlines. That buffer is running out.

Why This Wave Hits Different on the Field Side

Every one of these triggers produces the same downstream effect for the people who actually run the closing operations. More stores closing means more liquidation deals. More deals mean more field consultants deployed, more sign crews recruited, more shifts to fill, more work to verify.

But tariffs create a specific kind of pressure that the financial crisis and COVID did not.

In 2008, the wave was concentrated. Over-leveraged retailers collapsed in clusters. The deals were large but the pipeline had natural gaps. In 2020, the wave was sudden but temporary. Lockdowns forced closures and then the market adjusted. PPP loans kept some chains alive long enough to restructure.

Tariffs are different because they are persistent. They do not spike and recede. They sit on top of every other pressure a retailer was already facing: e-commerce erosion, rising lease costs, labor market tightness, post-COVID consumer behavior shifts. A retailer that could survive on thin margins at a 13% duty rate cannot survive at 35%. And the duty rate does not go back down on its own.

That means the pipeline stays full. Not a surge and a recovery. A sustained, high-volume flow of deals rolling through 2026 and likely into 2027.

For the field side, sustained volume is harder to manage than a spike. A spike is an all-hands moment. People stretch, they double up, they push through. Sustained volume grinds on the systems that hold the operation together. The spreadsheets that track which walker is assigned to which intersection at which store. The phone calls to verify someone actually showed up. The Monday morning reports that are supposed to reconcile a weekend of shifts across 50 or 100 or 400 stores.

Those systems were built for a different scale. They worked when the biggest deal was 200 stores and the pipeline had breathing room between projects. Payless was 2,500. JOANN was 790. Big Lots was 869. And the pipeline does not have breathing room anymore.

What We Are Seeing on the Ground

The operational pattern repeats on every deal. More stores, tighter timelines, thinner margins. Liquidation fee structures cut advertising spend first when the math gets tight. Sign walking is an advertising line item. When someone asks "did walkers actually show up at Store 147 last Saturday?" and the answer is a phone call or a text message or nothing at all, that line item is the first thing that gets questioned.

It is not that anyone is doing the job badly. The people on the field side of this industry are some of the hardest-working operators I have encountered in almost 30 years. But the tools have not kept pace with the scale. When you are managing sign crews across 45 states on a multi-firm joint venture, you need more than a spreadsheet and a phone.

That gap is exactly what pushed us to build OnPost. A walker gets a link before their shift. They tap it, GPS is captured, they take a photo of the sign, and they are done. No app to download. No login. No training. The regional manager sees it. The consultant sees it. A proof page is generated with GPS coordinates, a timestamped photo, and an audit trail.

It does not matter whether the trigger is a financial crisis, a pandemic, or tariffs. The field work is the same. What changes is the volume. And when the volume is high enough for long enough, the old way of doing things stops being charming and starts being a liability.

The volume right now is as high as I have seen it. And the tariff math says it is not slowing down.