lumes through major shopping festivals and year-end promotions. In Australia, the Australian Retailers Association and Roy Morgan estimate $72.4 billion will be spent across the six weeks from mid-November to Christmas Eve, up 4 per cent year on year. These are the numbers that make headlines. The post-Christmas story, however, is shaped by refunds, exchanges, store credit, customer service workload and the operational strain of processing returns often without receipts. The after-Christmas crossroad In Australia, Boxing Day spending is estimated at $1.3 billion, rising to $3.7 billion across the six days that follow. Comparable patterns appear globally. In the US and parts of Europe, the days immediately after Christmas consistently rank among the busiest for returns and exchanges. It’s usually described as a hunt for bargains, but it’s also when customers come back to exchange, request a refund, or rethink what they bought. Returns are part of the peak season that retailers rarely celebrate, but they are becoming strategic. Globally, the scale is significant. The US National Retail Federation, working with Happy Returns and UPS, forecasts a 15.8 per cent returns rate in 2025, representing almost US$850 billion in returned merchandise. Annual US returns alone are estimated to approach US$890 billion, underscoring how central reverse logistics has become to retail economics. While returns behaviour varies by category and channel, the direction is consistent across developed retail markets. That design challenge is now central to brand trust. In a cost-of-living environment, consumers are more value-conscious and more sensitive to fairness. The tension for retailers is making returns easy enough to protect loyalty, without making them so simple that they encourage unnecessary or opportunistic returns. The response is more visible, comprising tighter eligibility rules, shorter return windows, improved fraud detection and a growing emphasis on exchange-first or store-credit pathways that preserve value and trust. This is where New Year’s Eve enters the plot. The final week of December is a hinge between calendars, and the moment retailers close the year’s theatre and open the year’s ledger. Inventory that returns to the system has multiple possible afterlives: reshelving at full price, marked down, routed to outlets, bundled, refurbished or written off. Each path has a margin signature and, most importantly, a risk. Returns are operationally heavy, but they are also philosophically revealing, asking what a retailer believes about waste, about honesty, about the second life of goods. More parcels, more exceptions The physical burden is rising as peak season is now delivered, not just sold. In Australia, Australia Post reports peak-season parcel volumes regularly exceeding 100 million deliveries across November and December. In the US, carriers handle more than two billion parcels during the holiday period alone. More parcels inevitably means more “exceptions,” more missed deliveries, porch theft anxiety, last-mile delays, and the post-Christmas administrative tide of customer queries and claims. Then there are gift cards, a Christmas product that is almost pure liquidity. The policy and economics are well-trodden, but the details matter because they speak to consumer trust. So what does a “decent” post-Christmas period look like for executives? Beyond the dopamine of traffic spikes, it seems like precision. This includes staffing returns desks responsibly, building reverse-logistics capacity without overcapitalising, using loyalty and CRM data to recognise high-value customers without punishing honest mistakes, and turning Boxing Day from a blunt markdown instrument into a controlled reset. The temptation is to see the post-Christmas week as a clean-up. The smarter reading is that it’s a diagnostic and a rare moment when customers physically reveal, through return behaviour, what they really value: reliability, clarity, speed, and trust. Christmas is the performance. The following days are the critique. And in that critique could be the blueprint for the year ahead.