The Peak Your Store Managers Have Never Run
Twelve weeks to Black Friday. Most retailers are deep into seasonal hiring, delivery schedules and floor plans. There is one number I rarely see anyone check: how many of your store managers have actually run a peak in their current role.
Do the arithmetic
In the last large survey of US retailers I saw, store manager turnover ran at about 18 percent a year. Hourly staff turned over at roughly 75 percent. Compound the manager figure over two years and about a third of your store managers are in their first or second year in post. Assistant managers and department leads turn over faster still, so the layer that runs peak hour by hour is greener than the store manager population suggests.
That is not a hiring problem. That is a knowledge problem.
Where the playbook went
The manager who ran last year's peak knew where the queue built at two o'clock on the Saturday before Christmas. She knew which delivery slot slipped every year, which seasonal hire to put on click and collect, and how to keep the back door moving when three pallets arrived at once. Very little of that was written down. It was experience. It left the building in a cardboard box on her last Friday.
The seasonal army is not your biggest peak risk. The risk is that the people leading it have never seen the battle.
Three things to do in twelve weeks
- Count. Ask every regional manager how many of their store managers, assistant managers and department leads have run a peak in this role. Not in retail; in this role, in this store. If the answer surprises you, it is already useful.
- Transfer, do not train from scratch. Pair every first-peak manager with someone who has run three or more. Make it structured: a week-by-week walk-through from the first delivery surge in October to the returns queue in January. Knowledge transfer works when it is deliberate and fails when it is left to lunch breaks.
- Give them the numbers, not just the tasks. A first-peak manager who understands what a lost sale on 20 December costs the store, and what an hour of overtime buys back, makes better decisions at five o'clock on a Saturday than one following a checklist. The checklist covers the plan. The numbers cover what happens when the plan breaks.
The retailers who have a good peak
They are rarely the ones with the best plan. They are the ones whose store managers know what to do when the plan stops working. That is a capability, not a document, and twelve weeks is enough time to build a good part of it if you start now.
Martec's store operations learning paths were built by people who have run peaks, and they link each role to the KPIs it moves. If you would like to see how that works, the summary paper on upskilling and reskilling is at martec-international.com/research.
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Posted by Brian Hume
23rd September 2026
