2026 Warehousing Survey
What our customers are prioritizing, what's costing them, and what's quietly in the way
Last year, we ran our first customer survey and asked a simple question about your biggest operational challenge. The answers were sharp enough that we made it an annual habit. This is the second year, and this time we asked what you’re prioritizing for 2026, what gave you the most grief in 2025, and what hurdle you see coming.
Three questions, three different lists. The interesting part isn’t any single answer, but how little the lists overlap. What you want to work on, what’s hurting you, and what’s standing in your way are three separate conversations. Here’s what you told us in each.
Your priorities: a safer floor and fewer mistakes
We asked you to rank six priorities for 2026 from most to least important. Two rose clearly to the top.
First was improving worker safety and ergonomics. A third of you (33.55%) ranked it your single most important priority, and two-thirds put it in your top two. In a year defined by cost pressure, that’s a notable place to plant your flag. It says you understand something that doesn’t always show up on a budget line: an injury is one of the most expensive things that can happen on a floor, and a safer operation is a steadier, more productive one.
Second was reducing errors, damage, and waste. Different goal, same instinct. Every mis-pick, damaged carton, and reworked order is margin walking out the door, and in a tight year, plugging those leaks is some of the cheapest money you’ll ever make. One of you put the whole balancing act in a single line:
“Balancing the safest, fastest, and highest quality matline in the world with softening demand”
Together, the top two priorities tell a consistent story. You’re focused less on doing dramatic new things and more on doing the existing things cleanly.
Read more: An ergonomic labor strategy
What’s costing you: capital and labor
Then we asked what your most persistent operational headache was in 2025. The order:
- Rising capital costs for materials, shipping, and transport – 28.75%
- Labor shortages, costs, or high turnover – 24.38%
- Equipment downtime and maintenance delays – 17.50%
- Systems hitting capacity or running out of space – 15.63%
- Safety concerns or near-misses on the floor – 8.75%
Here’s the shift worth noting. In last year’s survey, labor was the clear number one. This year it came in second, edged out by the rising cost of the physical things your operation depends on: materials, equipment, freight. Labor didn’t get easier, but this time something else just got harder. Plenty of you still feel both at once:
“Cost and shortages of quality labor.”
And it got harder from a direction that’s tough to push back on. You can sharpen a hiring process or rework a shift schedule. The price of steel or a container is mostly handed to you. One response named the bind exactly:
“The biggest hurdle I foresee will be our ability to keep competitive pricing with all the increased costs that are out of our control.”
The two top concerns sit on opposite ends of that spectrum, one you can manage from inside the building and one you mostly can’t, and both landed heavily in 2025.
Read more: Automation: It’s not all or nothing
Space shows up in individual responses
The first two questions were multiple choice. The third we left open, asking what hurdle you see coming over the next two years. That’s where space showed up, and it showed up in your own words rather than ours.
Notably, expanding your square footage ranked dead last as a stated priority for 2026. That makes sense in a year when capital costs topped the headache list, since adding building is the most expensive move available. But the open responses tell you space is still very much a live problem. It just isn’t one you’re eager to spend your way out of.
“Having to grow vertically, because we can’t expand our footprint. We’re at 1 million sq ft and finding floor is harder and harder to do.”
“We’re implementing FIFO lanes and markets at the point of use, so we’ll be hard-pressed to find space throughout the plant. Need to maximize square footage.”
Read those next to the priority ranking and the picture sharpens. Space isn’t something most of you want to write a check for right now. It’s the constraint sitting underneath the goals you do care about. It’s hard to make a floor safer, or speed up flow, or cut the errors that come from cramped, cluttered work zones when there’s no room to work with. Space rarely tops the list on its own, but quietly shapes how far you can get on everything else.
What it adds up to
These questions speak to an overall theme discussed over the last few years. It’s not a concise headline, but each response is it’s own story in the larger context.
What they sketch is operations under real cost pressure, choosing to spend energy on the fundamentals it can actually control: protecting its people, cutting its mistakes, and getting more out of the floor it already has. A year of tightening the bolts on what’s already there. From where we sit, in a year shaped by costs you didn’t choose, that’s a sound place to put your attention.
We’ll ask again next year. We’re curious to see which of these lists move, and which ones stubbornly don’t.
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Evan Fleishacker is a Marketing Strategist at Cisco-Eagle. You can find him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/evanfleishacker