Retail Brew // Morning Brew // Update

June 23, 2026

It’s Tuesday, and Amazon’s Prime Day event starts today, though if you’re part of the estimated 86% of online shoppers who have a Prime account, you already knew that. As for the other 14%? We got you.

In today’s edition:

—Vidhi Choudhary, Andrew Adam Newman, Alyssa Meyers

E-COMMERCE

Summer fling

The collage shows a hand holding a mobile device, surrounded by stars and Amazon shipping boxes, highlighting a trustworthy shopping experience and customer satisfaction.

Lucy Naland

Amazon’s June Prime Day is no longer a midsummer sale. This year, it’s an early summer event that could shake up the broader retail shopping calendar.

Amazon’s Prime Day—synonymous with deep discounts and deals—will run for four days, from June 23 until June 26, making this the second consecutive year Amazon has stretched the event beyond its original two-day format.

Amazon has been rewriting the Prime Day playbook ever since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, experimenting with the number of days, adding a fall edition, and now shifting the whole thing to June, before summer travel kicks in and big events like the FIFA World Cup really start competing for people’s attention.

“By moving Prime Day so much earlier this year and keeping the four-day format that it launched last year, Amazon is able to pull summer’s retail calendar forward and gain better access to consumer spending,” Sky Canaves, eMarketer analyst for retail and e-commerce, told Retail Brew.

Keep reading here.—VC

Sponsored By Toast

Eggs, milk, truffles…

Gourmet grocers and/or specialty food stores are on the rise, and consumers are blurring the line between eating out and cooking at home. Hence, the fancy pants grocery lists.

High-margin prepared foods, artisan sandwich stations, and beverage bars are transforming grocery stores into daily destinations.

Toast shares that the global gourmet food market size is projected to explode to $931.15b* by 2034 (as reported by Fortune Business Insights). But unlike conventional supermarkets using broadline distributors, specialty grocers juggle fragmented networks.

Toast Retail is designed to help protect profits with AI invoice scanning (which automatically receives stock and flags supplier cost changes) and automated PAR-level alerts to prevent stockouts.

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Explore Toast Retail.

CONSUMER BEHAVIOR & TRENDS

Ghouls rush in

Spirit Halloween

Sure, some of your coworkers have some skeletons in their closets, but imagine working for a retailer where the stockroom is filled with them. If you like how that sounds, dust off your résumé (but maybe leave some cobwebs on it for effect) because Spirit Halloween plans to hire more than 52,000 seasonal workers in advance of the spookfest.

That’s a significant bump from the 40,000 the company expected to hire in advance of the 2023 Halloween season, and a return to growth beyond the 50,000 it projected hiring in both 2024 and 2025.

Spirit Halloween also reports that the 1,575 stores it will open in the US and Canada this season is a record.

Keep reading here.—AAN

MARKETING

Cup and away

Unilever

There’s no product in higher demand than an ice-cold beverage at a World Cup stadium in the middle of June—expect, perhaps, a stick of deodorant.

Enter CPG giant Unilever, which owns brands including Axe, Dove, and Degree, and is activating its World Cup sponsorship in several host cities across North America. And while the 360-degree marketing effort includes pro athlete endorsements, influencer partnerships sit at the center.

Keep reading here on Marketing Brew.—AM

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SWAPPING SKUS

Today’s top retail reads.

Cold plunge: UPS will invest $48 million in new temperature-controlled facilities due to booming sales of pharmaceuticals that need refrigeration. (CNBC)

Chewing the fat: Food companies like Utz and Conagra are adding beef tallow—popular among MAHA proponents—to select products. (Food Dive)

Treasure hunt: Bed Bath & Beyond is asking customers to help find “the oldest surviving Bed Bath & Beyond coupon,” and the winner gets a $100,000 home makeover. (USA Today)

Is this gourmet? Toast shares that gourmet grocery stores typically have gross margins of 40%–50% and net profit margins of 2%–5%** (as reported by BusinessDojo). Learn about how Toast Retail can serve you.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

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✢ A Note From Toast

[Source: *https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/gourmet-food-market-111096]

✤ A Note From Toast

[Source: **https://dojobusiness.com/blogs/news/tool-revenue-gourmet-grocery-store]

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