I think 2026 is going to be a year of widening.
During good years everyone tends to do well, but during difficult years fortunes really diverge, and that’s especially true in e-commerce. In four of the five years following the Great Financial Crisis, there was so much variance in building materials supply store e-commerce results that the Census couldn’t even publish the data.
I expect something similar in 2026, driven in part by AI and in part by the changing shopping preferences of the pro labor force that we’re seeing in our own survey work.
I also see a widening around the broader economic truth. Response rates for the Census Current Population Survey fell as much between 2020 and 2025 as they had in the prior 20 years.
Census officials themselves have talked about the uncertainty this adds to survey results that businesses and the federal government rely on to make financial and monetary decisions. Whether it’s job growth, labor force participation, or employment growth being rebenchmarked to population totals, the uncertainty about what’s really happening is going to widen.
That increases the importance of good alternative data sources, like what we provide at Zonda, because the risk of making the wrong choice is higher when the official data has larger error bands.
Finally, I expect the spread between maintenance and repair projects and large remodels to widen. A lot of projects that might have been a major kitchen remodel will likely become smaller maintenance jobs, just doing the necessary work until conditions improve. We’ll still see growth in maintenance and repair, but continued weakness in the larger remodels.
