July 31, 2026 Weekly Retail Supply Chain News

The Section 122 global import surcharge, in place since February 24, expired on schedule at 12:01 a.m. EDT on July 24 — hitting its 150-day statutory limit with no Congressional extension in sight. Retailers who spent the summer racing container bookings to beat the deadline got their answer on what comes next, and it isn’t a clean rollback.

• The replacement:** The U.S. Trade Representative moved into the same minute Section 122 lapsed, implementing new Section 301 duties of 10 to 12.5 percent tied to forced-labor enforcement, applied across roughly 60 countries. Goods loaded onto a vessel before the July 24 cutoff are exempt from the new forced-labor tariffs; anything entering after it falls under the new regime regardless of when it was ordered.
• What stays the same:** Section 232 sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, copper, and autos are untouched — they never stacked with Section 122 and have no sunset clause. China’s pre-existing Section 301 lists, ranging from 7.5 to 100 percent, also survive the transition intact.
• The retail impact:** This is primarily a story about general merchandise sourced outside the EU and USMCA — apparel out of South Asia, electronics from Southeast Asia, machinery from Japan and Korea. For distribution and merchandising teams, the practical task isn’t waiting for clarity; it’s re-running landed-cost models against the new duty layer and confirming which in-transit POs land in the gap between the old and new rate structures.

A Texas jury awarded approximately $604 million in a fatal-crash case involving C.H. Robinson, one of the largest freight brokerages retailers route truckload volume through. The verdict has triggered a broader selloff across publicly traded third-party logistics providers, as investors price in the possibility that brokers — not just the carriers they hire — can be held liable for accidents involving contracted drivers.

For retail supply chain and transportation teams, this isn’t a courtroom story to skim past. Broker liability exposure directly affects carrier vetting standards, insurance requirements written into freight contracts, and how much diligence procurement teams are expected to document before awarding lanes to non-asset-based brokers. Expect freight sourcing RFPs to start asking harder questions about safety-monitoring practices in the coming quarter.

FedEx confirmed its 2026 holiday demand surcharge calendar: charges begin September 28, with the steepest fees running November 23 through December 27, plus additional volume-based charges for shippers exceeding 105 percent of their June baseline. FedEx is also expanding delivery and pickup surcharges across more than 200 ZIP codes and extending an inbound processing fee to shipments entering all 27 EU countries starting August 3.

The cost pressure isn’t isolated to parcel. New truckload contracts are running roughly 10 percent above year-ago bids, and spot truckload rates out of 13 major U.S. ports rose 44 percent year over year in June as record import volumes moved inland — a trend expected to continue as July’s import surge works through the network. Domestic intermodal volume was up 15.6 percent year over year in June, the second-highest monthly total on record, though slower train speeds are raising service-reliability concerns heading into 2027 bid season.

Meanwhile, LTL capacity is tightening from the supply side: at least one major carrier has closed a portion of its smaller terminals and consolidated subsidiary brands, and a regional carrier exited the market entirely earlier this summer. Shippers leaning on rate softness as a planning assumption should treat it as temporary — the underlying capacity trend points the other way.