Warehouse and store congestion from high volume of size/style exchanges

$120,000–$300,000 per event season in liquidation losses, emergency logistics costs, and obsoleted inventory; 30–40% of returned special-occasion items miss resale window and must be donated/destroyed • $200,000–$500,000 per season in trapped capital from wrong size mix, markdown losses, and clearance discounting; estimated 3–5% of seasonal revenue lost to overstock alone • $200K+ annual from deferred sales and extra labor due to capacity clogging at 24% return rates.

District Manager uses WhatsApp/Slack side-channels with warehouse manager and store leads to manually coordinate returns; keeps informal tally of stores with backlog in Notes or OneNote; escalates to central warehouse via email threads; no visibility into root cause • Loss Prevention manually flags suspects using memory/notes; warehouse processes all returns uniformly without triage; no automated fraud scoring; Loss Prevention uses internal fraud lists kept in memory or shared via email • Manual Excel pivot tables fed by weekly warehouse reports; email summaries shared 3–5 days late; spreadsheet-based size curve modeling updated by hand; no real-time dashboards