From the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail, The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness retail leadership podcast explores the skills, mindset, and strategies retail executives need to lead successfully in the AI era. Stay Sharp. Lead Boldly. Stay Human.

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The question I keep avoiding.

I told April Sabral on air that this might be my favorite topic, which is a risky thing to say before your guest starts talking. She then spent 15 minutes making me feel like I should audit my own last three meetings.

April wants leaders to end your meeting by asking the team:

what did you learn from me today?

The question that would tell you the most about your leadership is the one you avoid, and you avoid it for exactly the reason you should be asking it. I remember many times in a past role where I was part of a team that wished our executive leader asked this question at the end of a meeting. He probably wouldn’t have liked the answer.

April was back on the Blade to Greatness podcast this week. If you’re not familiar with her work, she’s a bestselling author (most recently published Positive Accountability for Teams: Building a Culture of Success) and a leadership coach. Our topic was the manager to coach reset that retail really needs right now. Casey Golden framed the timing: this has been a hard sales year, holiday is coming soon, and teams are being judged on numbers the economy is setting for them.

That’s the exact moment leaders default to pushing the to-do list. April’s argument is that the to-do list is what makes everything worse.

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Register by August 28 at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

The 80/20 test.

This is April’s simple test, and it costs nothing.

When you leave your next meeting, count you time speaking vs listening. If you didn’t spend 80% of it listening and 20% of it talking, you haven’t made the shift to coaching yet.

I like this test because it forces you to be honest. Most leadership advice is hard to fake. This one gives you an immediate answer, and the answer is usually no.

April’s setup for it is the part I keep repeating in conversations with retail leaders. In a store, we push people to ask customers questions. Listen to what they say. Respond to that. Most retail people do this well. Then we promote them, hand them a team, and the skill vanishes. They start believing the job is telling people what to do all day.

Same person, same building, new title. The questions stop.

April’s fix is simple and intentionally not very glamorous:

Write your questions down before the meeting. Before the huddle, the store visit, the call. Two questions she uses to open are what did you learn yesterday, and what will you try differently today.

Five words instead of “you missed target.”

This is the part I would tape onto the inside of a back office door. In a giant font size.

When someone misses a number, don’t open with the number. If your expectations were clear, they knew before you walked in. You know they know. They know that you know they know. Saying it out loud only tells them you came to lecture. No one wants to be lectured.

Open with this instead: walk me through your process.

Then stop talking and listen for where it broke down.

April calls what comes next coaching the gap, and the point is that you now know where the gap actually is.

You can’t coach a number. You can coach the one step in a sequence where somebody hesitated or strayed.

April walks through exactly how that conversation goes at 11:53 in the episode, including the part where the person starts diagnosing it for you. Worth two minutes.

Her honest caveat: this takes real skill and effort from the leader, and it’s slower. That cost is why most people skip it, even though it’s practically gold.

Positivity you can put on a scorecard.

Casey asked the question I wanted to ask, which is how you measure any of this when sales are down for reasons nobody on your team controls.

April’s answer was simple and accountable:

• Track turnover.

• Track customer reviews.

• Track productivity.

Measure them before and after coaching training, and positive leadership stops being a thing you have to defend in a budget meeting.

Then she said the line that made the episode for me, and I am 100% stealing it:

April can read it walking into a store. The person in front of her is tense, head down, finishing a task. Nobody has recognized them lately. Nobody has taught them anything lately. The customers standing in that store feel it too. Which is how it lands in your reviews and then in your sales numbers.

Where I landed.

Retail leadership coaching typically gets filed under soft skills, and that filing is why it keeps losing to the to-do list when the sales quarter gets tight.

April’s framing fixes that. Operational consistency comes from systems, growth comes from questions. Keep every system you have. She’s clear those come first.

If you only run systems, you get a team that executes, stops improving, and leaves for somewhere that develops them. Every exit interview says the same thing. People want to be trained.

Watch, listen, subscribe.

🎙️Blade to Greatness, Season 2 Episode 11: Retail Leadership Coaching & The 80/20 Rule That Defines It

The full episode with April Sabral is available now. It runs 15 minutes. That’s less time than one exit interview, and considerably cheaper in the long run.

Next episode preview: Steve Worthy returns to address something every retail tech founder needs to hear. He calls it “the accelerator mindset,” and it’s all about how growth really happens in retail businesses.

Your Turn.

Subscribe now and you get the best of each episode in your inbox before you have time to listen. If this one was useful, forward it to the leader on your team who is still reading the to-do list out loud every morning instead of asking a coaching question.

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Comment on this newsletter or join the conversation on LinkedIn! Your insights can help shape the topics we explore next!

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Lead boldly. Stay human.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness

Join the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail as we cut through the clutter in retail strategy, innovation & leadership to help you maximize growth for your business. Subscribe to The Retail Razor Show podcast! Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

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I’ve been promised robots my whole life.

Casey joked on this episode that she expected to be living like the Jetsons by now. Instead, she’s doing her own dishes and hauling her own Amazon returns. I’m in the same boat. Decades of demos, and robotics has mostly lived somewhere between science fiction and a slide deck.

So I came into this conversation open-eyed and enthusiastic, while also a bit skeptical. What gave it an edge and drew me in was one of Brittain Ladd’s LinkedIn posts about grocery retail.

If you spend much of your time doom-scrolling your LinkedIn feed you’ve seen Brittain tell grocery leaders to go meet Hank Crawford and his team. Repeatedly. Across multiple posts. Brittain doesn’t hand those out for fun. He only doles out recommendations like this after a thorough analysis which he fully documents in his posts. I wanted to know what he was seeing that the rest of us were missing.

So we invited Hank onto the show, and he brought Paul Harker with him. Hank is Co-Founder and CEO of Blue Collar Robotics. Paul retired as Chief Commercial Officer of Woolworths Group, Australia’s largest retailer, and signed on with Blue Collar as a strategic advisor. That second part matters. A man with nothing left to prove doesn’t lend his name to a robotics startup casually.

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Register by August 28 at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast.

The number that reset the conversation.

There are about 280,000 people picking groceries inside US stores right now.

In the aisle, with a cart, walking past you while you shop, assembling somebody else’s order. The demand for that work is growing faster than grocers can hire for it, especially at 2 and 3 in the morning, which is exactly when you’d want it done.

I’ve watched the friction firsthand at my own store. Shoppers looking irritated because they feel like they’re in the way. Pickers looking irritated because they are, in fact, in the way.

Casey put it best:

If you’ve been to New York City at the end of a work day, you know exactly why Casey’s comparison resonates. And if you haven’t… it’s ok, no judgment.

Paul’s number is the one that should worry any grocery retail operator.

Over 80% of a grocer’s business is still the customer physically in the store.

So eGrocery growth, the thing everyone is chasing, is quietly degrading the business that pays the bills, and delivers the largest share of customer experience.

The warehouse answer already lost.

The industry’s first attempt to solve the eGrocery fulfillment problem was possibly the most obvious one. Copy general e-commerce and build a big automated centralized fulfillment center Then pick everything there.

Hank listed four reasons it collapsed, and none of them are fixable with a better robot.

The economics are volume dependent, so you need order density to justify the building. The building pulls inventory away from the customer, which pushes last-mile cost back up. Fresh resists automation. And the capital expense is enormous. A spend that duplicates the store network the grocer already paid for.

Micro fulfillment centers were the compromise, and Paul took them apart just as cleanly. Casey and I were surprised. We remember our MFC episode from season 2. At the time, it showed a lot of promise.

The challenge is you still need space adjacent to the store or you carve into your own selling floor. You still carry heavy CapEx. You duplicate inventory. And people still pick the fresh items and what he calls the uglies, because nobody has automated someone ordering a mop.

So the industry came back to the store. With people. All 280,000 of them.

They sell picks by the item.

Here’s the part I keep chewing on. Blue Collar’s product is the pick itself. Not the robot rolling through the aisles doing the picking.

A grocer pays a cost per pick, which means the spend lands in OpEx instead of a capital project, and the grocer never hires a robotics engineer. Blue Collar signs up to a contracted pick rate and a quality standard.

Hank’s line was blunt: if they miss it, the retailer doesn’t pay the bill.

The robot handles packaged center-aisle goods with vacuum suction, which is roughly 65% of a typical basket. Frozen food behind glass doors is out of scope. Fresh stays with the associates, which is where you’d want your best people anyway. picking ripe avocados.

Blue Collar reports fulfillment cost down by as much as 50%.

And there’s a person behind every robot.

A remote operator watches, takes the hard calls, and the robot learns from what that person does. Hank designed it that way on purpose, partly so the robot develops what he calls robot etiquette: it hangs back and lets the shopper shop.

He’s got a story about a hotel in China that explains exactly what he’s trying to avoid. It’s at 40:18 and it’s worth the two minutes.

Where I landed.

I went in expecting a labor-replacement pitch and got the opposite argument.

Hank’s position is that nobody is standing in line for picking jobs. Grocers can’t fill the roles they already have.

eGrocery is somewhere around 15% of the business and could double inside two to five years.

The constraint is scarcity.

Then Paul made the point that’s stuck with me ever since. Today you can only take that job if you can physically get to one specific store during specific hours. Remote operation deletes both constraints. Someone who uses a wheelchair can’t walk a store picking orders. They can run a robot that does.

The thing I can’t shake is Hank’s read on his own pipeline. The national retailers are finding him. They understand the problem. What’s missing is urgency.

Listen to the whole thing.

🎙️The Retail Razor Show, Season 6 Episode 10: “280,000 Pickers: The eGrocery Fulfillment Math Nobody Fixed”

Hank and Paul are both worth the full hour, and Paul has a genuinely strong philosophical detour near the end about whether societies will bend the real world to suit robots or build robots that suit the real world. I didn’t see that one coming.

If you’re new here, subscribe. We publish an edition for every episode of The Retail Razor Show, plus bonus content that doesn’t make the recording.

Your Turn.

If you learned something from this issue, subscribe so the next edition finds you.

Next episode: we’re jumping head first into the world, and history, of in-store retail media. The former head of Walmart TV’s successor, Walmart Smart Network tells us where it’s headed.

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Comment on this newsletter or join the conversation on LinkedIn!
Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show

Retail Transformers brings you candid conversations with the people reshaping the future of commerce - the crazy ones, the rebels, the change makers, innovators, disruptors, and bold thinkers. Stay Sharp. Be Bold. Transform Retail!

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Should your refrigerator have a personality?

Casey asked that about ninety seconds into our latest Retail Transformers episode. She was listing everything marketing has had to absorb in the past ten years. Billboards to banner ads to AI agents to creator economies to retail media networks to, and I’m quoting her, whether your refrigerator should have a personality.

I laughed and said that’s what everybody needs. Then I remembered who was waiting to be introduced. Cole Moir spent the last three years leading brand marketing at TCL, which makes, among other things, refrigerators. So the joke may not age well.

That’s the problem with marketing right now. The absurd thing you say to get a laugh is somebody’s roadmap.

Cole is at a transition point in his career, which is the only reason a conversation like this happens. Twenty years at Ogilvy, 360i, and Edelman, then Samsung, Sony Entertainment, Motorola, and TCL, where the brand became the fastest-growing consumer electronics company two years running. He’s owned the NFL relationship. He’s partnered with Olympic athletes. And nobody’s PR team was on the call.

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Head to retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast to get your ticket today!

31% of the Fortune 500 has no CMO.

That’s the number he opened with, and he named Starbucks, Walgreens, and General Motors.

I’d watched the trend for years. The number was new to me. Once you have it, the story tells itself:

the job got more accountable, less protected, and stretched across channels that didn’t exist three budget cycles ago.

So companies rename it. Chief growth officer. Chief revenue officer. Or they don’t backfill at all.

Cole’s read is that the job became a business job, and the word he reached for was transformation. Casey pushed on the obvious next question. Does the next CEO come out of marketing rather than sales? Cole said he’d put money on it. So would I.

Taste is now a hireable skill.

This is the part I didn’t expect.

Cole listed the three things he’d tell a 25-year-old marketer to build. Data was first, which anyone could have guessed. Talking to real customers was third, which is the kind of thing leaders say and rarely fund.

Second was taste.

His reasoning is that AI can produce infinite creative, so the constraint moves to the person who can look at a hundred versions and know which one is right for this brand, this audience, this week.

He wants that judgment on the payroll. I’ve never heard a marketing leader put taste in a skills stack next to data literacy, and it took about four seconds to make sense. Because of course it does.

The partnership math nobody publishes.

Here’s how a challenger TV brand like TCL builds the case for an NFL deal.

Only 5% of NFL fans have ever been to a game. 95% watch at home, on their own TV or a friend’s. And of the 100 most-watched TV shows over the past decade, 96 are football.

That’s a category argument.

Cole ran three tests on every partnership:

1. does this partner give us credibility we haven’t earned

2. audiences we can’t otherwise reach

3. content we can’t produce at scale

At TCL he needed all three, which he says is rare.

The Olympics story is better. TCL partnered with Jack and Quinn Hughes four or five months ahead of the Games, to build the relationship before anything ran. Then Jack scored the gold medal goal. Cole quoted his old coach: success is when preparation meets opportunity.

Where I landed.

There are two things I’m still chewing on.

The first is the budget. Casey handed him $200 million on air and he split it in about forty seconds, with real percentages and a floor underneath. I’m leaving the split out of this newsletter issue, partly because he earned the right to say it himself and partly because his reasoning matters more than the numbers. It starts at 32:39. What I will give you is the floor: 25% in the upper and mid funnel, and if you’re under it, he thinks you’ll feel it inside two years. Tech buying cycles in his world ran six months to seven years. You can’t convert people who never entered consideration.

The second is his test. I’ve already asked three people this week.

If they’d go back, it’s attached to a plan that runs fine without it. If it breaks, something real happened.

Everyone I’ve asked so far would go back. Including two people who talk about AI constantly. It’s the perfect test for every leader to seriously think about.

He also named the four roles he says every marketing team needs, and the two he’d stop hiring for. That one starts at 13:32, and it’s worth checking out.

Go deeper.

Season 2, Episode 8 of Retail Transformers, with Cole Moir: “31% of the Fortune 500 Has No CMO Role.”

Watch or listen to the full episode and learn what Cole sees the CMO role evolving to in the near future. Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!

Your Turn.

If you’re new here, subscribe. Casey Golden and I do this every week, and the guests keep saying things they probably shouldn’t. And that makes it extra special fun.

Next time on the show: Shannon Flanagan returns to talk about her new book, what RWIT has achieved a year later, and what her career path has taught her.

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Comment on this newsletter or join the conversation on LinkedIn! Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

Leave a comment

Until next time! Stay sharp. Be Bold. And Transform Retail!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Retail Transformers

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

Subscribe now

Everyone said the robots would take restaurant jobs.

I went into our Data Blades 3-part finale half-believing it too.

Then Dr. Chad Moutray, the chief economist at the National Restaurant Association, put a number in front of me that I keep repeating to people.

94% of operators told the NRA their technology investments over the past two to three years did not permanently eliminate a single job.

Not trimmed. Not “mostly.” Zero permanent cuts, for 94 out of 100 operators.

I sat with that on the recording, because the story we all carry around is so different. A machine shows up, a person goes home. The data says something quieter happened. The technology made the people already there faster.

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RetailClub AI Festival, September 22 - 24, 2026

The Retail Razor Podcast Network is partnering with RetailClub!

Join 2,000 retail leaders at the RetailClub AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Dive deep into how AI is reshaping retail while soaking up the sun at a fully outdoor, beachside venue. Decision-makers from retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement.

Head to retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast to get your ticket today!

The margin is why this matters.

Chad grounded the whole thing in one brutal number. A typical full-service restaurant runs on a 2.8% profit margin. Limited service is around 4%, and it keeps shrinking.

When your margin is that thin, you don’t buy restaurant technology to look modern. You buy an hour back. So the question stops being “will this replace someone” and becomes “where is my team losing time that doesn’t pay off.”

Hiring is where the clock is loudest.

The average restaurant turns over 122% of its staff a year. The average applicant applies to at least 15 jobs. So speed decides who actually gets the worker.

Chad described operators who went from weeks to a few days between posting a role and filling it.

When you pull days out of that cycle, you pull days out of the understaffing that wrecks a shift.

There’s a specific piece of this I loved, and I’m going to make you watch for it. People apply for restaurant jobs at strange hours, often after the kids are down, at one or two in the morning.

No manager is awake for that.

But something else can be. How that “something else” gets a qualified applicant onto a manager’s calendar without a human touching it is the cleverest restaurant staffing move in the episode. It’s at 08:18. Go see it. Or listen. Your choice.

The part nobody should skip.

Here’s the takeaway theme of the episode:

Chad was blunt about the tradeoff:

new technology usually adds work before it saves work, and you may be reskilling current staff to run it.

That up-front cost is real, especially with fast turnover. And then Casey made the point that reframed the episode for me. In retail, most people opening a support chat are already annoyed. In a restaurant, almost everyone who walks in came to have a good time. You can automate the hiring, the paperwork, the reminders.

You can’t automate the welcome.

Lose that and you lost the reason they came.

Where I landed.

The recurring theme that survived all three episodes?

Technology augments what people do. It doesn’t replace why they’re there.

Watch or listen, and subscribe.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 12: “94% of Restaurants Cut Zero Jobs to Technology”

Watch or listen to the full finale, and if you subscribe you’ll get the next series the moment it drops.

Your Turn.

If someone forwarded you this newsletter, subscribe so the next amazing mini-series lands in your inbox. It’s free, it’s every episode, and it comes with exactly this much attitude. You’ll thank me later.

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Comment on this newsletter in Substack or join the conversation on LinkedIn.

Leave a comment

Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

Subscribe now

The hidden economics of employee retention.

I’ve recorded a lot of conversations about labor, especially frontline workers. It’s one of our most important themes we carry across every podcast. Most of them leave me with a good vibe. This one left me with a number, and I haven’t been able to shake it.

Day 32.

That’s roughly when a new hourly restaurant worker stops costing you money and starts making you some.

For a manager, it’s day 72.

I heard Dr. Chad Moutray say it on the record and my first thought was: does anyone run their schedule like they know this?

Chad is the Chief Economist & Sr Vice President of Industry Research & Knowledge at the National Restaurant Association, and he came on for Part 2 of our Hiring & Staffing series to talk about the least glamorous, most expensive problem in the business: keeping the people you already hired.

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The Retail Razor Podcast Network is partnering with RetailClub!

Join 2,000 retail leaders at the RetailClub AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Dive deep into how AI is reshaping retail while soaking up the sun at a fully outdoor, beachside venue. Decision-makers from retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement.

Head to retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast to get your ticket today!

Every hire starts underwater.

Here’s the framing that reorganized my thinking.

The day you hire someone, they’re a loss. You paid to post the job, paid in manager hours to interview, paid for orientation, paid for the training and the mentoring from the people showing them the ropes.

On day one they add nothing to the bottom line.

“Net positive” is the day the math flips. Chad used to call it the magic number. For hourly staff it lands at 31.8 days. And if you lose someone at day 20, the report’s blunt about it: that was a bad hire. You paid to train someone who never paid you back.

The manager math is the scary one.

72.2 days.

More than double.

So restaurant manager retention is a different order of risk. Lose a manager at day 40 and you’re not just down a person, you burned two months of investment and you’re restarting the whole 72-day clock.

Then Chad said the part that actually worried me.

A manager doesn’t leave alone.

The good ones have a following.

People take the job because of them and follow them across stores. So a bad manager quietly drains your hourly staff, and a great one who walks out the door can take a chunk of the team with them. That’s the domino I hadn’t priced in.

If you’ve worked in restaurants or stores, you know how powerful it is to have a great manager. Now think back to that great manager you had, and imagine they left. Would you want to follow them where ever they landed?

The first 90 days is where it’s won or lost.

The report flags 30 to 90 days as the highest-turnover window, and Chad’s reasons were refreshingly ordinary. People stay when they feel heard early. When the job matches what they were sold in the interview. When someone cross-trains them so they feel useful and needed instead of parked on one station.

You’ve heard it forever: people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers.

What got me is that Chad has watched this exact pattern outside restaurants too, in a completely different industry, and it held. I’ll let him tell that one on the episode, because the where and the why surprised me and you’ll want to hear it from him.

Where I landed.

If the manager is the single biggest lever on whether someone reaches day 32, then “invest in retention” stops being a poster in the break room and becomes a budgeting decision.

I asked Chad where the first tight dollar should go. His answer was onboarding, the first two weeks, getting people productive and connected fast.

And my favorite moment of the whole conversation was one operator’s onboarding trick that turns day one into a game. I’m not going to spoil how it works here. It’s worth hearing Chad describe it, and it reframed onboarding for me from paperwork into something people actually remember. Hint: it involves creative gamification.

Watch or listen, and subscribe.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 11: “The 32-Day Pay Off: Restaurant Employee Retention”

The full episode has the 31.8 and 72.2-day math, the manager domino effect, and that onboarding idea in Chad’s own words.

Next week we close the series on how technology is reshaping restaurant hiring and training, without replacing the human touch that makes hospitality work. Subscribe so it lands in your inbox.

Your Turn.

If someone forwarded you this newsletter, subscribe so Part 3 lands in your inbox. It’s free, it’s every episode, and it comes with exactly this much attitude. You’ll thank me.

Subscribe now

Comment on this newsletter in Substack or join the conversation on LinkedIn.

Leave a comment

Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

Join the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail as we cut through the clutter in retail strategy, technology & leadership to help you maximize growth for your business. Subscribe to The Retail Razor Show podcast! Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

Subscribe now

Store Traffic Is A Gift.

We chased Mark Ryski for months. On air I honestly couldn’t remember how many, and Mark’s answer was “decades in the making,” which tells you how these scheduling threads go. Worth every follow-up email.

Here’s why.

Ten minutes into the conversation, Casey described how store staffing decisions got made when she worked the floor:

And Mark, the man who’s spent almost 30 years measuring store traffic, just repeated it back: “It was a vibe.”

That exchange is the whole episode in miniature. The most important number in physical retail, in-store conversion, still gets run on vibes at most chains.

Mark Ryski is the founder and CEO of HeadCount Corporation and has written three books on retail traffic and in-store conversion. His newest, Store Traffic Is a Gift, is the reason we finally got him on The Retail Razor Show.

Mark’s origin story alone earns the listen.

Marketing manager at a computer store in the early 90s, watching a packed promo day end with the owner counting the till and shrugging “it was okay.” The commercial traffic counter cost $2,500; the owner said no, that’s another radio remote. So Mark had two engineering students who worked part-time in the store build him one. $300 in RadioShack parts, an infrared beam, data dumped to Excel.

He’s been counting shoppers ever since.

SPONSOR: RetailClub

RetailClub AI Festival, September 22 - 24, 2026

The Retail Razor Podcast Network is partnering with RetailClub!

Join 2,000 retail leaders at the RetailClub AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Dive deep into how AI is reshaping retail while soaking up the sun at a fully outdoor, beachside venue. Decision-makers from retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement.

Head to retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast to get your ticket today!

The store is the best converting channel in retail. By a lot.

A typical online site converts under 3% of its visitors. Amazon, around 10% excluding Prime members.

Physical stores convert 20%, 30%, up to 70%+ depending on category.

And per the US Census Bureau’s March 2026 report, 84% of retail sales still happen inside stores.

Casey’s test: if a store converted 2% and let 98 of every 100 visitors leave without a hello, you’d close it and fire everyone.

That exact math gets celebrated on e-commerce dashboards every single day.

77% of the walkouts came to buy.

Mark worked with a 60,000 sq ft big box retailer convinced that everyone who visited bought something. So HeadCount ran exit surveys on shoppers leaving without a bag. Two questions.

• Did you intend to buy today? 77% said yes.

• Why didn’t you? Couldn’t find anyone to help. Didn’t want to wait in line. Couldn’t get questions answered.

The traffic was already there, already paid for.The sales walked out the door.

And a retailer counting only transactions never sees it happen, because the till can’t count the people who left.

Mark’s favorite line on this came from a store manager, and it became the book’s title. Store traffic is a gift.

It’s also, as he puts it, precious and non-renewable: that shopper got off the couch, got in the car, and drove to you, and if the visit goes badly there are a hundred other ways to buy the same product.

When retailers tell him they run a “destination store,” his answer is that unless the store is on Mars, he doesn’t believe it.

Your labor schedule is probably circular.

Labor follows sales: stores that sell more get more staff.

Sounds reasonable, and it’s backwards.

Sales happen where staff are present to convert, so staffing to sales just reinforces the pattern you already have.

Mark’s fleet data shows conversion ranging from 30% to 75% within a single chain, same products, same training. The stores at 75% aren’t the flagships. He has a method for finding them (quadrant analysis, around 28:08) that I won’t try to compress here, because his walkthrough is better than my summary.

Where I landed.

I’ve spent years pushing back on retail apocalypse headlines, and this episode gave me the sharpest ammunition yet.

The store isn’t retail’s legacy problem. It’s retail’s highest-converting asset, run with less measurement discipline than the average email campaign. If you own stores and you can’t say what your conversion rate was yesterday, that’s the gap.

Not traffic. Not Amazon. Measurement.

Mark also gives his 5 fastest conversion wins early in the conversation (20:55). I’m deliberately not listing them. The first one alone is worth the listen, and his delivery of “for God’s sake” is worth the other four.

Go deeper.

🎙️The Retail Razor Show, Season 6 Episode 9: “Store Traffic Is a Gift - Retail's Most Misunderstood Metric”

🎧 Watch or listen to the full conversation with Mark Ryski.

📖 Mark’s book, Store Traffic Is a Gift, and HeadCount Corporation.

Your Turn.

If this landed, subscribe so the next edition finds you.

Next episode: we’re going deep into the real-world advantages of robotics in grocery retail.

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Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

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My Son Took a Restaurant Job. An Economist Says It’s the Best Training in America.

My son came home from college in May and took a job in a restaurant kitchen. I figured he’d learn to show up on time and maybe stop treating our dishwasher at home like a suggestion.

Then Casey and I sat down with Dr. Chad Moutray, Chief Economist & Sr Vice President of Industry Research & Knowledge at the National Restaurant Association, to record the newest episode of Data Blades, and Chad informed me my son basically enrolled in the biggest training program in America.

Half of all Americans got their first job in a restaurant.

Two-thirds of us have worked in one at some point. Chad included. Me? Never did. After this conversation I feel like I skipped a semester everyone else took.

We recorded this one last month just days after a fresh JOLTS release and the monthly jobs report, so this was a live read on the labor market, not a history lecture. Restaurants added 48,000 jobs in May and 220,000 over the past year. Chad’s take: the labor market is more resilient than anyone gives it credit for, mostly because people will cancel a vacation before they cancel dinner out. Respect.

Three things from this conversation are still rattling around in my head.

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One empty chair costs more than you think.

Here’s the number that made me put my coffee down.

One person. A single gap can cut sales 7 to 8% per meal period.

The mechanics are painfully simple. Short a server, and tables sit empty because the servers you do have can only cover so much floor. Short a cook, and the kitchen slows down until somebody’s shutting off third-party delivery just to survive the rush. Every one of those turned-away orders is money you already spent rent, insurance, and food costs to be ready for.

I used to file understaffing under “annoying.” It’s a line item. Run the math on your own empty shifts and watch how fast your next scheduling meeting changes.

The Great Stay is a window, not a fix.

Understaffing dropped from 78% of operators in 2021 to 22% in 2025. Hiring is genuinely easier. The Great Resignation gave way to the Great Stay, where people anxious about the economy hold onto the job they’ve got.

So naturally I asked Chad for the takeaway, expecting something comforting. Instead he calmly explained that fertility rates are at an all-time low, boomers keep retiring, and the US is heading toward net negative population growth.

His exact words: demographics are not our friend.

He expects tight labor markets for a decade or more. The man delivers hurricane forecasts in a weather-report voice, and I mean that as a compliment.

My read: this cooler market is a window for hiring deliberately instead of desperately. Windows close.

You run a hiring machine whether you like it or not.

Average restaurant turnover in 2025: 122%.

The industry runs roughly 952,000 hires and 937,000 separations every single month.

The average restaurant rebuilds its entire team every year. Casey called operators “masters of onboarding” and she wasn’t joking.

She also said that if she had to hire six great people fast, she’d skip the resume pile entirely and go poach servers, because nobody on earth hustles like someone who’s survived a Friday dinner rush with ten tables. I laughed. Then I realized she’s completely right, and I’ve been reading resumes for the wrong reasons.

Chad walked us through how operators are compressing hiring from weeks to days, including chatbots that screen the candidate who applies at 3 a.m., and how chains use data to spot which location is about to crack before it ever shows up on a P&L.

I won’t spoil the details here.

That part starts around the 18-minute mark and it’s worth hearing in his words.

Where I landed.

The tech buys you speed. The people are the product. Nobody has ever walked back into a restaurant because the applicant tracking system was excellent.

They come back for the bartender who remembers their order and the server who shows up at the table at exactly the right moment.

Restaurant staffing is a math problem and a people problem at the same time, and the operators who win the next decade will be the ones who take both seriously.

Also, I may owe every restaurant kitchen in America an apology for underestimating them. My son’s learning more this summer than I expected.

Hear the whole conversation.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 10: “Restaurant Labor Market 2026 - The $5,000 Cost of Understaffing”

This is Part 1 of a three-episode series with Dr. Chad Moutray on the NRA’s 2026 Hiring & Staffing report. Watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Part 2 gets into the number that genuinely surprised me: how long a new hire takes to become profitable, and why the first 90 days decide everything.

Your Turn.

If someone forwarded you this, subscribe so Part 2 lands in your inbox. It’s free, it’s every episode, and it comes with exactly this much attitude. You’ll thank me.

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Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

From the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail, The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness retail leadership podcast explores the skills, mindset, and strategies retail executives need to lead successfully in the AI era. Stay Sharp. Lead Boldly. Stay Human.

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Scaling Innovation in Retail Without Innovation Theater.

Casey and I got Andy Laudato back on the show, again. Sixth time now, I think. I’ve lost count as he’s become a fan favorite across the podcast network. Every single time he says something that makes me want to hit pause and just sit there for a second.

This time it was a stat we keep hearing from one guest after another. He tossed it out casually, like it was nothing.

Ninety to ninety-five percent of AI projects fail.

Ninety to ninety-five percent. Andy’s the COO of The Vitamin Shoppe, so this isn’t some guy on a stage in Vegas selling you a framework. This is someone who has to look a board in the eye and explain where the budget went. Yes, he’s not the first guest to quote this stat. He may be the fifth. It’s a genuine trend. That tells you just how much everyone is paying attention to it.

So naturally, we spent the next twenty minutes talking about why retail leaders keep doing this to themselves anyway, and what it takes to scale innovation without setting money on fire.

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The Demo Room Problem.

You know the room.

Everybody’s gathered around a screen or a kiosk in the flagship store, the tech works exactly like it’s supposed to, and somebody in a nice blazer says “great, let’s put this in every store.”

Andy’s reaction to that sentence is basically: congratulations, you just set yourself on fire. That’s innovation theater in real time, and most retail leaders don’t recognize it until the bill shows up.

Here’s the part nobody says out loud in that room.

A pilot that costs $20,000 in one store does not cost $20,000 across a thousand stores. It costs $20 million.

Everybody can find twenty grand lying around. But as Andy reminds us, nobody, and I mean nobody, has an extra twenty million sitting in a drawer waiting to get spent on a “great idea.”

Andy’s answer to this isn’t complicated, and that’s what I liked about it.

Before you fall in love with a pilot, do the math on what it costs to actually scale it.

Not what it costs to look good in a demo. What it costs to be live, everywhere, for real.

Off Broadway, Not Opening Night.

Here’s the part that actually changed how I think about testing new ideas.

Andy doesn’t test big swings in the flagship store. He tests them somewhere nobody’s watching. He calls it testing “off Broadway,” which, I’ll admit it’s a good line and I’m stealing it.

The logic is simple once you hear it:

you want the smallest blast radius possible while you’re still figuring out if something works.

Your flagship is not the place to figure that out. Your flagship is the place you go once you already know it works.

I’m not going to give away exactly which stores Andy uses for this or how his teams end up volunteering for it, that part of the conversation is worth hearing him tell it himself, but the short version is this:

the stores you’d assume are the least exciting are usually the most eager to try something new. Nobody’s watching them as closely, so there’s less pressure and, weirdly, more fun.

Fail Like You Mean It.

This is the line from Andy that’s going to stick with you for a while:

rewarding failure is easy to say and really hard to do.

Everybody says they want a culture where people can take risks. Almost nobody actually builds one. The second a project doesn’t work, the instinct is to bury it, rename it, and never speak of it again. Andy calls that “the project that will not be named,” and if you’ve worked in retail for more than a week, you already know exactly which project he means at your own company.

His fix isn’t complicated either, though actually doing it takes real discipline.

Sit down. Talk through what went wrong, out loud, as a team. That’s the whole trick.

Where I Landed.

🎙️Blade to Greatness, Season 2 Episode 10: Scaling Innovation - A Retail COO’s Playbook

Here’s where I actually landed after this conversation, and it’s not the opinion I expected to have going in.

I used to think the hard part of innovation was coming up with the good idea. Every retailer I talk to has a drawer full of good ideas. The hard part, the actual skill of scaling innovation, is everything Andy talked about:

• doing the math before you fall in love,

• testing somewhere nobody’s watching, and

• being willing to talk honestly about the stuff that didn’t work.

None of that is glamorous.

Nobody’s writing a newsletter about their boring cost model. Except me, apparently, right now. But it’s the difference between a retailer who actually scales innovation and one who just performs it for a room full of executives once a year.

We didn’t even get to the part where Andy showed us what his team built for the new Manhattan flagship, or the reason he refuses to split his company into “innovation people” and “everyone else.”

That’s in the full episode, and it’s worth your time.

Give it a listen (or watch), and if you’re not already subscribed here, go ahead and fix that too. This is exactly the kind of conversation Blade to Greatness exists for: the unglamorous stuff that actually determines whether a retail leader succeeds.

Your Turn.

If someone forwarded you this and you want more of it in your inbox, the kind of retail writing that is occasionally useful and almost never about synergy or leverage, the subscribe button is right down there. It’s free.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Lead boldly. Stay human.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness

Retail Transformers brings you candid conversations with the people reshaping the future of commerce - the crazy ones, the rebels, the change makers, innovators, disruptors, and bold thinkers. Stay Sharp. Be Bold. Transform Retail!

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The Leadership Capacity Gap.

Every so often Casey and I record an episode that makes me want to put my own notes down and just listen like everyone else. This was one of those.

Our guest was Louisa Loran. Former exec at Google, Maersk, Moet Hennessy, and Diageo. Advisor to CEOs. Author of a recent book called Leadership Anatomy in Motion. On paper, I figured we’d spend an hour on AI in retail and call it a day. Instead she spent the hour dragging the conversation away from the tech and pointing it straight at the people in charge. I did not see that coming, and I’m still chewing on it.

Here’s some of what stuck. Not all of it. You’ll want the rest for yourself.

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The thing nobody wants to say out loud.

Louisa’s whole argument starts from an uncomfortable place.

Not the economy. Not the tariffs. Not even the customers. The tools are sitting right there. The budgets exist. The market keeps moving. And still, transformation stalls, because the people at the top haven’t done the work on themselves.

I’ve covered retail tech long enough to have heard every excuse for a stalled transformation, and almost none of them are ever “the leaders weren’t ready.” But that’s usually the real one. Louisa just says it out loud, which is exactly why I wanted her on the show.

You’re a chapter, not the book.

This was the line of the episode for me.

“You are a chapter in a book. You are not the book yourself.”

She was talking about leaders who show up, change the logo, shuffle the boxes on the org chart, and call it transformation. Meanwhile the tenures keep getting shorter, so the next person shows up and does the same thing before anything takes root.

If you’ve worked in retail for more than five minutes, you’ve watched this happen. Probably more than once. A new font is not going to fix your business, and Louisa has zero patience for pretending otherwise.

We’re automating our own mess.

Okay, this one made me a little uncomfortable, in a good way.

Louisa’s take is that most companies are using AI to automate broken experiences faster than ever. Hand a team a shiny new tool, tell them to do their job better, and they will. They’ll get very efficient at their own little slice of the customer journey while staying completely blind to the four other teams touching that same customer.

Her example was almost too real.

• Customer service is measured on closing the case fast.

• Sales is measured on the upsell.

• One cancels what the other just booked, over and over, because nobody owns the actual outcome.

• Now bolt AI onto that.

• Congratulations, you’ve made the mess run faster.

That’s the whole trap with AI in retail right now, and hardly anyone is talking about it this plainly.

The green dashboard is lying to you.

This is the part I keep coming back to.

Louisa said the problem isn’t measurement, it’s mistaking measurement for progress. And oof. Guilty.

We’ve all felt that dumb little hit of joy when the number turns green.

She’ll ask you what that green number actually did for the business, and half the time, a red number would have produced the better outcome. Measuring your goals is measuring the past.

I’ve defended a green dashboard or two in my life. I’m not proud of it. Haven’t we all?

What I walked away with.

🎙️Retail Transformers, Season 2, Episode 7: The Leadership Capacity Gap | Louisa Loran on Why Retail Transformation Stalls in the AI Era

There’s a whole stretch on luxury we didn’t get to here, where Louisa makes the case that luxury stopped being a category and became the baseline everyone expects now. And you know wee get into this deep since Casey would never let a good luxury retail discussion pass us by!

There are four leadership behaviors Louisa uses that reorganized how I think about who’s actually built to transform and who’s going to stall. And Casey pushed her on who’s winning in retail right now, which got an answer that surprised both of us.

I’m not giving all of that away. Go listen. It is a podcast after all!

What I took with me is simpler than I expected.

Know what you’re actually great at and bring more of that.

Get curious enough to admit you don’t have all the answers anymore. That second one is the hard part, especially if your whole career was built on being the smartest person in the room. That’s the unlearning. That’s the whole game.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube. Then go buy the book!

Your Turn.

If you lead anything in retail right now, or you want to, this is the episode I’d put at the top of your list. Louisa made me uncomfortable and hopeful in the same breath, which is a rare combination.

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Louisa at retailrazor.com, then do what she asks every leader she works with to do. Ask yourself what it would take to change your mind.

New here? Subscribe to the Retail Razor Substack for the highlights, the arguments, and the bonus content we don’t put anywhere else.

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Until next time! Stay sharp. Be Bold. And Transform Retail!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Retail Transformers

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Hey Retail Razor subscribers,

When I sat down to produce five recent episodes across the podcast network this past month, I wasn’t trying to prove anything. The point made itself. Different guests, different shows, different rooms, and every one of them landed in the same place on the question all of retail is arguing about right now.

Here’s what I found. AI should serve people, not replace them. And the evidence is a lot less subtle than I expected it to be.

The numbers that should end the argument.

On Data Blades, Casey and I went back through IHL Group’s 2026 Retail Transformation Study with Greg Buzek. If AI were quietly deleting retail jobs, the retailers using the most of it would be the ones shrinking their store teams. They’re doing the reverse. The most AI-ready retailers are growing store headcount at 70% versus 36% for everyone else, and the fastest-growing retailers are 115% more likely to be adding people.

Greg calls it the augmented associate.

Use AI to make your people more capable, and suddenly they’re worth keeping. He traced the whole idea back to self-checkout, 25 years ago. Kroger trained its best people to teach shoppers, then moved that talent to the high-margin fresh counters. Kmart bolted in the machines and cut the labor.

Same technology, two philosophies, two very different endings.

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The CIO who lived it says AI is not the point.

Then I sat down with Julie Averill on Retail Transformers, and she gave me the leadership half of the answer. Julie was the global CIO who helped scale Lululemon from $2 billion to $10 billion, and she just wrote a book called Chief Impact Officer. Her line stuck with me.

Bolt it onto broken data and weak processes and you get a great demo and garbage results, like the AI that cheerfully told a retailer to stock winter coats in Miami. That, she says, is why most AI projects fail, per a recent MIT study. The tech is rarely the problem.

So if you’re tempted to use AI as a quiet way to shrink your team, her whole career says don’t. The work that makes transformation last is human:

• Honest leadership about what’s changing.

• The boring data foundation nobody claps for.

• Developing your people so well you make yourself unnecessary.

Or as she puts it, AI is not the point. The people are.

The skills that survive get built on the retail sales floor.

On Blade to Greatness, Ron Thurston reminded me that the most future-proof skills in retail aren’t technical at all. They’re human.

You don’t pick that up from a binder. You build it on the sales floor, one conversation at a time.

His take on AI is the healthy one. Let the machine carry the operational weight, the policy look-ups and the product specs, so your associates can spend their attention on the human standing in front of them. The technology buys back the time. What you do with that time is the whole game.

Two events, same line in the sand.

I watched the exact same split play out in person. At The Lead Summit in New York, the sharp brands were using AI to buy back the hours their teams lose to busywork, then pointing those hours straight at the things a machine can’t fake.

The ones automating the human connection out of the experience are going to spend next year wondering where the loyalty went.

Then at Zebra Technologies ZONE conference in Nashville, I sat down with two of their executives braced for a hardware pitch, and got something better. Their CTO, Tom Bianculli, kept circling one phrase: pragmatic AI for the frontline. My favorite example was nursing. Nurses lose 25 to 30 percent of a shift to documentation, and nobody went to nursing school to do paperwork. Put AI on the device to handle it and you hand a fifth of the day back.

James Poulton, who runs their mobile computing business, said the line I keep repeating: it’s a fallacy to think frontline workers don’t want tools. Take away your own laptop and phone, then go try to do your job.

Five rooms, one conclusion.

Nobody compared notes. Greg is reading research, Julie led IT for a 10-billion-dollar retail organization, Ron is coaching leaders, and the two events were a world apart.

They all arrived at the same place anyway.

The technology is identical no matter which retailer you look at. The philosophy is everything.

One group is handing their teams superpowers.

The other is calling layoffs efficiency and hoping nobody checks the data.

So if you lead a retail team and you’re staring at an AI budget this year, sit with one question.

I would love to hear from you: : Hit the button to leave a comment and tell me where you've seen AI make a frontline job better.

Leave a comment

Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

With sincere gratitude,
Ricardo Belmar
Founder, The Retail Razor Podcast Network

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Hey Retail Razor fans, supporters, readers, listeners, and viewers!

This newsletter issue is a little different than what you’re used to seeing from me. This issue is the story of how The Retail Razor Podcast Network grew to what it is today.

About a year ago, I decided to do something that still feels a little surreal. July 2025 I had to leave Microsoft. The team I was part of was eliminated as part of an organizational restructuring. So I made the decision to go all in on The Retail Razor Podcast Network. Now I’m going to tell you the whole story of year one, the numbers, the surprises, and a thank you that I mean more than any metric on this page.

First, a bit of context, because the timeline matters to me. The Retail Razor Show podcast has been running since October 2021. Over the next couple of years I started to build a few more shows around it. The leap last July was not starting from scratch. It was the decision to bring these shows together, give them a unified banner, and run them as a single network, full time, with no safety net.

There was no guarantee that anyone would keep showing up.

But YOU did, and here is the result of what we built together.

The YouTube run still surprises me.

Video turned into the heartbeat of the network this year, and the last few months have been something else.

• We crossed 500,000 total YouTube views on June 20th. As I send this out, we are just under 535,000, with just over 160,000 of those from Shorts.

• We posted three straight months of more than 100,000 views each.

• The channel now has just under 3,500 subscribers and keeps climbing. (If you haven’t subscribed yet, go do that now and come back! I’ll wait!)

• One week we pulled in more than 65,000 views, our best week ever, which put us in the top 5% of all creators in the 1,000 to 5,000 subscriber range.

Over half a million views and a top 5% badge in the same month was not something I let myself imagine when I started.

The episodes you couldn’t stop watching.

One show became the runaway story of the year: Data Blades. Four of our five most watched episodes come from it, and every one of those hits is from season two, the first season we published under the network banner.

Here are the top five, trailers aside:

1. Data Blades, S2E7, “Only 9.1% of Retailers Have This, And It’s Reshaping Retail,” 23,000 views

2. Data Blades, S2E8, “The 97% Hiring Gap Nobody’s Talking About,” 18,600 views

3. Data Blades, S2E6, “Agentic AI Is Already Reshaping Retail, Here’s What’s Actually Happening,” 18,000 views

4. Data Blades, S2E4, “The Customer Experience Gap Nobody’s Talking About,” 17,000 views

5. The Retail Razor Show, S6E5, “The New Attack Surface Retailers Can’t Defend Yet,” 16,000 views

Our Shorts found their own audience too. A few that took off:

• “Retailers Have Been in Keyword Jail for 20 Years and Didn’t Even Know It,” 13,200 views, from Retail Transformers with Scot Wingo

• “What Every Retail Leader Gets Wrong About Growth,” 11,500 views, from The Retail Razor Show with Dr. Rebecca Homkes

• “Is Your Chatbot Actually Helping or Just Hiding?” 8,200 views, from The Retail Razor Show

• “Is AI Replacing Retail Workers? The Data Says No,” 7,000 views, from Data Blades with Greg Buzek

• “The AI Tool Frontline Workers Are Actually Asking For,” 6,000 views, from The Retail Razor Show

The topics drawing the biggest crowds tell you where retail’s attention is heading: agentic commerce, the augmented store associate, and store intelligence powered by AI. Retail media is the next wave building right behind them.

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Head to retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast to get your ticket today!

A huge THANK YOU to RetailClub for being our sponsor! The success & recognition covered in this issue wouldn’t be possible without their support!

Who has been watching.

The audience side has been just as encouraging as the view counts:

• We’ve been reaching about 65,700 people a month these last few months, and more than 80% were brand new viewers.

• New audiences tend to find us through Data Blades, while the folks who stick around watch The Retail Razor Show the most.

• Our viewers skew experienced, spread fairly evenly across age groups above 25, with roughly a third between 25 and 54 and roughly a third between 45 and 64.

• More than 80% are in the US and Canada, and we reach people in over 27 countries.

• About 80% of views happen on mobile, which surprised me, since YouTube says more than half of podcast viewing now happens on big TV screens. (Casey will be glad fewer than 10% of you are watching us on a 65 inch screen!)

• Across social, about two thirds of our followers hold senior titles: director, VP, CxO, or founder.

That last one means the most to me. We set out to make shows that retail decision makers would respect, and those are exactly the people in the room.

Climbing the Goodpods charts.

Audio is where all of this began, and the Goodpods platform has been good to us. Where our four shows have landed:

• Retail Transformers and Data Blades have both hit the top 2 on the weekly Top Indie Business Podcasts chart, and the top 5 of the weekly Top Business Podcasts chart more than once.

• Retail Transformers, Data Blades, and The Retail Razor Show show up repeatedly in the top 5 of the monthly Top Indie Business Podcasts chart.

• All four shows have landed in the top 5 of the monthly Top Management Podcasts chart, and the top 4 of the monthly Top Indie Management Podcasts chart. Data Blades and Retail Transformers have held the top 2 on the weekly Top Management Podcasts chart.

• The Retail Razor Show sits at #5 on the all-time Top Indie Management Podcasts chart.

• The Retail Razor Show and Data Blades land consistently in the top 5 of the weekly and monthly Top Marketing Podcasts and Top Indie Marketing Podcasts charts.

• Blade to Greatness and Retail Transformers have reached the top 5 of the weekly Top Careers Podcasts and Top Indie Careers Podcasts charts, plus the monthly Top Indie Careers Podcasts chart.

Four shows, charting across business, management, marketing, and careers. For an independent network, that spread means the world.

This newsletter plus a few awards.

Our newsletters have quietly become their own community, with more than 114 issues sent via Substack and 57 editions on LinkedIn, readers across 31 countries, and an open rate above 35%.

A few honors I’m proud of:

• Three time finalist and honorable mention for The Retail Voice Award at the Vendors in Partnership (VIP) Awards, in 2023, 2024, and 2026.

• Named to FeedSpot’s 100 Best Retail Podcasts.

• Named to Million Podcasts’ Best 70 Retail Podcasts.

• Included in the Thinkers360 Top 125 Podcasts from Thought Leaders for 2025 and 2026.

Thank you, and what’s next.

Here’s the part that matters most. Having to leave a strong role to build something independent was a real leap, and the only reason it worked is you.

Every view, every listen, every share, every reply.

The one thing this year drove home is that consistency compounds. Casey and I kept showing up, week after week, and you kept showing up with us. None of it came from one viral moment. It came from a steady drumbeat of episodes and a community that kept coming back.

You turned a bet into a network. The conversations ahead, on agentic commerce, AI in the store, and the future of retail media, are going to be the best ones yet.

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Hi! I’m Ricardo! Thanks for joining us!

Come find The Retail Razor Show, Data Blades, Retail Transformers, and Blade to Greatness wherever you watch or listen!

I would love to hear from you: which episode stuck with you this year? Just hit the button to leave a comment and tell me.

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Here’s to year two! 🥂

Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

With sincere gratitude,
Ricardo Belmar
Founder, The Retail Razor Podcast Network

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

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Your Returns Are a Black Hole. The Winners Climbed Out.

Let me start with a confession. I have clothes in my closet I have never worn and almost certainly never will. Bought them a size too small, told myself the gym and I were about to become very close. Reader, we did not. (But I keep telling myself it will happen soon. Very soon.)

Casey and I just closed out our three-part run with Greg Buzek of IHL Group on the Data Blades podcast, and somewhere in the middle of it Greg dropped a number that made me feel a little better about my closet and a lot worse about retail.

Women’s dresses bought online get returned more than 90% of the time.

Ninety.

Casey had literally just done a giant returns run the week we recorded, so this one landed in real time.

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The number I can’t stop thinking about.

Here’s the stat that opened the whole episode.

The most profitable retailers are 555% more likely than the laggards to have buy online pickup in store fully optimized. Across the entire industry, only about 18% have actually solved BOPIS.

Read that again.

BOPIS is the thing every retail exec has sworn they nailed since the pandemic. Turns out almost nobody did. That gap between “we offer BOPIS” and “we make money on BOPIS” is the single biggest divider between winners and everyone else in Greg’s 2026 Retail Transformation data.

I didn’t expect it to be that lopsided, and I’ve been doing this a while now.

The winners are weirdly boring.

I walked into this series assuming the separator would be some shiny AI thing.

Nope.

The thing Greg kept dragging us back to is the connected supply chain and the deeply unglamorous plumbing underneath it.

A couple numbers that made me sit up.

Retailers using RFID are 1,600% more likely to be optimized for pickup, ship-from-store, and local delivery. The sales winners growing 10% or more are 160 times more likely to be on RFID.

And computer vision, the stuff that used to need a server room, now runs on the edge for under 500 bucks on hardware about as fancy as a Raspberry Pi.

I’ll be honest, the edge computing part is where Greg lost me for about ten seconds and then completely won me back. I’m not going to butcher his explanation here. Go listen to that stretch around the middle of the episode. It changed how I think about where the smarts in a store actually need to live, and should live.

Returns are where the money quietly dies.

Back to my closet. Returns run 18 to 20% of items overall and 60 to 70% in fashion. Reverse logistics is so expensive that plenty of retailers now just tell you to keep the cheap thing, because shipping it back costs more than the item is worth.

Greg has a term for why we all over-buy and over-return, and it’s the best retail phrase I’ve heard all year. I’m not spoiling it. Casey’s reaction the second he said it is worth the listen on its own.

There’s also a story about a loss prevention crew, some backpacks, and a barber shop in Brooklyn that I flat out refuse to ruin for you. Just know that the “boring” inventory tech (ahem, RFID) turns out to moonlight as a detective.

What I actually walked away with.

Here’s where I land, and I’ll say it plainly. Most of the AI in retail conversation right now is theater. Everybody wants the demo. Almost nobody wants to do the dull, thankless work of getting their inventory data clean enough for any of the fancy stuff to even function.

The retailers running circles around their peers didn’t buy a magic model.

They built a connected supply chain on clean data, then let AI do the parts it’s actually good at. And the piece I care about most, the thread through all three episodes with Greg, is that the winners aren’t using this to pull people out of stores.

They’re using it to take the counting and the guesswork off associates so the humans can do the human stuff.

That 555% gap isn’t luck.

It’s a choice a lot of companies keep quietly deciding not to make.

🔊Go listen. Or Watch.

The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 9: “The Connected Supply Chain - Why Retail’s Profit Winners Are 555% Better at BOPIS” with Greg Buzek of IHL Group

Greg brought receipts for every single claim, and there’s a lot we didn’t get to here, including the return-fraud tactics and a smart-mirror bit that genuinely surprised me. The full episode is on YouTube and every podcast app.

Your Turn.

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Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast

Retail Transformers brings you candid conversations with the people reshaping the future of commerce - the crazy ones, the rebels, the change makers, innovators, disruptors, and bold thinkers. Stay Sharp. Be Bold. Transform Retail!

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Your AI Told You to Stock Winter Coats. In Miami.

Picture a brand new, very expensive AI system looking at a store in Miami and confidently deciding the smart move is to load it up with winter coats. Not a glitch. The thing worked exactly as designed. It just got fed data so messy it couldn’t tell “available in navy” from “available in blue,” so it did the math and ordered parkas for people who own three pairs of flip flops and nothing else.

That story has been living rent free in my head since we hit stop on this episode.

Casey and I just sat down with Julie Averill for the latest Retail Transformers podcast, and I will be honest, our shared notes doc was the longest we have ever built going into a recording. Julie spent a decade at Nordstrom, ran technology at REI, then spent seven years as the Global CIO of Lululemon while it went from $2 billion to over $10 billion. She has a new book out called Chief Impact Officer, and the subtitle does the heavy lifting on what she believes: real transformation comes from human, not just artificial, intelligence.

If you only take one thing from this episode, take this thought from Julie.

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Why 95% of AI projects fail, in one sentence.

You’ve seen the stat by now. Something like 95% of AI pilots never make it out of the lab. The lazy read is that the technology is not ready. Julie’s read, and I think she is dead right, is that we keep bolting AI onto broken processes, half-built data, and decision rights nobody can actually name. The AI then does its job perfectly and hands you a perfectly confident wrong answer. Winter coats. Miami.

This is the part that should make a few executives squirm.

The reason why AI projects fail is rarely sitting in the model. It’s sitting in the org chart, the spreadsheet someone has been quietly maintaining for five years, and the foundation everyone agreed to deal with “later.”

AI just moved the deadline on later to right now.

The data foundation nobody wants to fund.

Julie does something in this conversation that I wish more leaders would do. She admits she kept putting off building a unified data foundation, year after year, because there was always something flashier to ship. Then AI showed up and made the bill come due.

Here is what makes it hard, and why your favorite vendor will not solve it for you.

A real data foundation is not a technology problem. It’s a business process problem wearing a technology costume. The attribution starts in merchandising, runs through customer experience, and ends up in supply chain, and everybody along the way has been adding their own little fields and quirks. Until someone with authority stands up and says this is not what we build on, you cannot fix it. You can only keep piling more AI on top and hoping.

Of course, this is the part where I remind you that hope is not a strategy.

Julie also said the quiet thing out loud about real-time data. It used to be a competitive advantage. Going into 2027, it’s just the price of admission. If your competitor is changing prices by the minute and you’re running a weekly spreadsheet that one person uploads on Monday, you’ve already missed the market 57 times before lunch. Ok, I’m paraphrasing, but only barely.

The catcher’s crouch, and the best business advice hiding in a baseball glove.

Quick detour that turned into one of my favorite parts.

Julie comes from a baseball family. Her grandfather is in the Hall of Fame, her dad played for the better part of a decade behind the plate, and she talks about leading from the catcher’s crouch. Low, wide, ready, and the only player on the field looking out at everything instead of in at the ball.

She calls it systems thinking, and once she said it I couldn’t unsee it.

The catcher reads every hitter’s tendencies, knows how people behave under pressure, and sees the whole field as a set of parts that have to work together. That’s the job when you’re running technology for a company growing in every direction at once. You’re not staring at the pitch. You’re watching the entire game.

Selling the upside and skipping the cost.

This one got Julie on her soapbox, in the best way. She drew a straight line from return to office to AI, and it’s uncomfortable because it’s true.

When companies pushed everyone back to the office, leaders sold the upside. Culture, collaboration, the water cooler magic.

What they skipped was the cost people were quietly absorbing, like the after-school pickup that no longer worked or the parent at home who now needed other care. Julie owns that she did exactly this. And the result was predictable. People are smart. They know the truth.

When you only give them half of it, they decide you are either lying or naive, and either way you lose trust.

Now watch what is happening with AI.

Endless talk about efficiency and tools at your fingertips, and almost nobody saying the honest version: I cannot promise your job is safe, but I can promise you will be part of this and I will support you the whole way.

Worse, companies are laying off thousands and slapping an “AI efficiency” label on it to look like visionaries instead of admitting they overhired during the pandemic and are course correcting.

Julie made this point as clear as a storefront window:

If the companies laying off thousands have become so efficient from AI that they no longer need the employees, then they must have incredible revenues and strong balance sheets. Except they don’t.

The good news, and Julie called this too, is the market appears to have stopped rewarding the spin.

People are smart. They know the truth. When you only give them half of it, you lose them.

Make yourself unnecessary.

There is a chapter in the book about the goal of leadership being to make yourself unnecessary, and it stuck with me because most executives would never say it out loud and it’s a team management philosophy I’ve held for years.

Julie got to a point at Lululemon where she looked around and realized she had climbed the hill, she had the scar tissue to prove it, and the team did not need her anymore. So she left.

Then a dream job showed up almost immediately.

Bigger company, great culture, the obvious next rung. She turned it down. Not because anything was wrong, but because taking it would have answered the safe question instead of the real one, which was: who is Julie without a logo?

If you’re somewhere between 40 and 60 and that question just landed a little too hard, you’re not alone, and this is the part of the episode you will want to sit with.

So, is the book worth it?

Yes. Next question.

And I do not say that about most business books, which tend to be one decent idea in a trench coat pretending to be 250 pages. Chief Impact Officer is honest in a way the genre almost never is. Julie tells you about the wins, sure, but she also tells you about the resignation letter she wrote in a Vancouver hotel room, the masks she wore as the only woman in the room, and the foundation she deferred for too long.

The stories are the argument.

You finish it understanding why real retail AI transformation is a people project before it’s a technology project.

I asked Julie what she would put on a billboard outside every retail tech conference, aimed straight at the vendors. She did not hesitate.

AI is not the point.

Frame that and hang it over the demo room.

🔊Go listen, then go buy the book. 📕

Retail Transformers, Season 2, Episode 6: In Retail AI Transformation, AI Doesn’t Fix Your Culture, It Reveals It

We barely scratched the surface here. The full conversation goes deeper on the Bangalore tech hub Julie built to 46% women in a market where 14% of STEM jobs go to women, the merchandising AI demo that fell apart the second a real human asked a real question, and a lot more. It is one of the best ones we have recorded this season, and I‘m not just saying that because Casey will read this.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube. Then go grab Chief Impact Officer. Your data foundation will thank you.

Your Turn.

If this landed, subscribe so the next one shows up in your inbox. We do this every episode, and the guests keep being people who seriously transformed retail instead of just tweeting about it.

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Until next time! Stay sharp. Be Bold. And Transform Retail!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Retail Transformers

Join the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail as we cut through the clutter in retail strategy, innovation & leadership to help you maximize growth for your business. Subscribe to The Retail Razor Show podcast! Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

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I Went to Nashville Expecting a Device Story. I Got Something Better.

Picture a store associate holding a handheld with 80 apps loaded on it. They use about a dozen. The rest are digital clutter that somebody back in corporate was sure they needed. That picture sat in my head for two straight days in Nashville, and it’s still the cleanest way I know to explain what Zebra Technologies ZONE 2026 Customer Conference was really about.

I was there as one of the media guests, two days of keynotes, demos, customer conversations, and two exclusive interviews I will point you to in a minute. I came home with a notebook full of session receipts and a pretty strong opinion about where AI for the frontline is actually heading. Here is the short version. Some of it you should hear in the guests’ own words, so I am holding a few things back so you have another reason to listen or watch the episode. It is a podcast after all!

Zebra quietly stopped telling a device story.

We all know Zebra from the handhelds and scanners in every store and warehouse you have ever walked through. The headline for me this year is that they are done being only a device company. They are telling a frontline platform story now, and they anchored it on three software launches.

• Zebra Nucleus is a single pane of glass for configuring and managing every device they make, mobile computers, scanners, printers, RFID readers, all of it. Those used to live in three or four separate tools.

• Workcloud IO is an integration and orchestration layer that connects to more than 250 enterprise apps and routes the right work to the right person.

• Workcloud BI delivers role-based dashboards, so an associate, a store manager, and a regional director each see what they actually need and nothing they do not.

Management, orchestration, intelligence. Not the flashiest three words in tech, and that turned out to be the whole point.

The numbers that floored me.

Here’s the stat that stopped the room.

Retailers are loading frontline handhelds with 70 to 80 apps, and workers regularly use about a dozen. The 80/20 rule, alive and well, costing real money.

Suresh Menon, who runs the software business, put up a McKinsey figure on stage that frontline workers spend roughly 30% of their time just hunting for information they do not have. Then he said about half of all frontline errors trace back to someone not understanding a standard operating procedure. Read those two together and the conclusion writes itself.

This was never a hardware problem.

Giving people a nicer device was only ever part of the equation. The real job is letting people actually do their job.

Zebra’s answer is a super app they call Sync that covers something like 99% of what a frontline worker touches in a shift. Communication, tasks, scheduling, clock in and clock out, even micro-learning. All the things that used to be 70 or 80 separate icons, routed through one app the associate actually opens.

As somebody who has said for years that email is where information goes to die, I found that very easy to root for.

The word I heard more than my own name.

Tokenless.

If I had a dollar for every time someone said it, running out of tokens, blowing the token budget, wanting to go tokenless, I could have bought a year of cloud tokens with the proceeds.

Zebra’s AI bet is on running things locally. The model is hosted on the device, the inference happens on the device, nothing makes a round trip to the cloud, so no tokens get consumed. The timing was almost too perfect, because the news headlines had just published had Uber and Microsoft both admitting they had to pull back on AI spend because token costs were torching their budgets.

Zebra walked on stage and basically asked, what if your AI bill was zero?

The part people miss is latency. Frontline work needs an answer in tens of milliseconds.

Think about how long you wait after you hit send on ChatGPT. A second, two, three. Now imagine you are the associate and a customer is standing right there counting those seconds. It feels like an eternity, and the meter is running the whole time. On-device AI just works in the flow of the moment, which for this kind of work matters more than almost anything else.

The surprise I did not see coming: language.

One executive shared that almost 68% of US frontline workers speak a language other than English at home, and that a single distribution center had 18 different languages on the floor.

Eighteen.

They also said nearly half of frontline mistakes can be traced back to a language miscommunication.

Zebra’s fix is real-time AI translation built right into the workflow, down to live voice, running on the device. I speak English, you hear Spanish, and back again. I had lunch with Erin Vigil from Burlington, a retailer with no e-commerce where every sale happens in the store, which makes the associate the entire show. She told me that translation feature was one of the biggest wins across their associate base and a no-brainer to switch on.

That’s what a practical use of AI looks like, and it does more than save a few minutes. It changes how it feels to show up for that job.

Two interviews you should actually hear.

I sat down with two Zebra leaders, and they make a great pair because they come at this from opposite ends.

Tom Bianculli is the CTO, the big-picture guy. His framing of pragmatic AI is the idea I keep coming back to. His favorite examples are not fantastical.

• A nurse spends 25 to 30% of a shift on documentation, and ambient AI on the device hands roughly 20% of the workday back. Nobody went to nursing school to do paperwork.

• A receiving dock where 40% of manifests show up with no barcode goes from typing every field by hand to snapping one photo that drops straight into SAP.

His tagline for all of it is “better every day,” and after two days I understood why.

James Poulton runs mobile computing, and he is delightfully opinionated. I opened by asking what is most overhyped in AI right now, and his answer is going to surprise a few people. I will let him say it in the episode, but the short tease is that he thinks the obvious thing everyone is chasing is the wrong tool for the frontline.

He has a great story about warehouses running for decades on a 25-word vocabulary, and he is the one who dropped the line Casey gave the quote of the episode to.

Hear the setup before that line lands. It’s better with the runway.

So what do I actually think?

Here is where I land. Every customer story at ZONE was the same shape underneath. A fixed labor pool meeting growing demand. You cannot hire 20% more people or pour 20% more concrete to fix that, so you give the people you already have the superpowers to do the work better and faster.

That is augmentation, and it’s the thread Casey and I have been pulling on this show for years.

The technology industry is finally catching up to the idea that your associate experience is your customer experience.

A futurist at the keynote, Jonathan Brill, had a metaphor I can’t shake. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons live in its arms, not its head, so the arms explore and decide on their own while the brain coordinates. Push the intelligence to the edge instead of hoarding it at headquarters. That is exactly what good frontline AI should do, and it changes who gets to make decisions in a store.

If I had to compress two days into one idea, it would be that consolidation is the new innovation. The win is not a shiny new feature. It’s taking a sprawling mess of apps and tools and collapsing it into one console and one experience a human can actually use. And the proof is in the small numbers. A second and a half per delivery. Four taps instead of eight. A two-minute training video instead of an hour in the back room.

Scale those tiny moments across millions of interactions and you get a real ROI, which is a far more honest case for AI than most of what gets shouted from a stage.

Pragmatic, on-device, augmentation over replacement. That is the version of retail AI I will keep betting on.

🔊Hear the whole thing.

The Retail Razor Show, Season 6, Episode 8 BONUS episode: Pragmatic AI for Retail’s Frontline: Tokenless & On-Device

Find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Goodpods, YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Transcripts and guest info at retailrazor.com.

Your Turn.

Listen to the full bonus episode of The Retail Razor Show for both interviews and the four big takeaways. If you’re not subscribed yet, you’ll want to fix that — in a few weeks we have a three-part series going even deeper on the frontline with the National Restaurant Association.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

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Robots Were Supposed to Take Retail Jobs. Someone Forgot to Tell the Data.

I have sat through a lot of conference sessions in the last two years, and they all run the same slide. A moody photo of a robot, a headline about AI coming for retail jobs, and a speaker nodding like they just personally invented weather. Casey and I have seen it enough times that we can mouth along.

Then we got Greg Buzek back on Data Blades for part two of our series, he pulled up the actual numbers, and the whole doom story fell apart in about ninety seconds.

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Head to retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast to learn more and get your ticket today!

The stat that should end the debate.

The retailers deploying the most AI in their stores are not quietly trimming staff.

They are hiring.

Edge-current retailers, meaning the ones actually running modern store infrastructure, plan to add store associates at 70% versus 36% for everyone else.

The retailers growing sales the fastest are 115% more likely to be adding people.

That’s the opposite of what you’ve been promised at every keynote since 2023. And it’s not a rounding error. It’s the headline.

We have all seen this movie before.

Here’s the part that made me grin. None of this is new. Greg walked us back twenty-five years to the dawn of self-checkout.

Kroger took its best employees and had them teach customers how to use the machines. Then they moved the freed-up staff over to the hot food counters, the fresh bread, all the impulse stuff that actually makes money.

Sales went up.

Kmart bought the same machines, used them to cut labor, and the whole thing was a flop they bailed on fast.

Same technology. Two completely different decisions about what to do with people.

Twenty-five years later we’re running the exact same experiment with AI, and the retailers treating it as an excuse to thin the ranks are about to learn the Kmart lesson the hard way.

So what is an “augmented associate” anyway.

Fair question.

The short version is giving your store team tools that make them faster and smarter rather than handing them a pink slip.

A few of my favorites from the conversation:

• Voice tools that work in the associate’s native language, so the person stocking your shelves can ask “how do I change the printer paper” and get an answer in the language they actually think in. Walmart has trained more than two million associates on AI tools. This is real, at scale, today.

• A walkie-talkie moment at curbside pickup. The associate radios that the order is ready instead of walking off and leaving the customer standing there. Net promoter score jumps about 25%. Tiny change, big feeling.

• Returns routing that tells the associate in seconds whether an item goes back on the shelf, back to the vendor, or straight to the next online order.

There’s a whole stretch on last mile delivery, restaurant handhelds, and why returns are secretly where the margin hides. I’m not going to spoil it here. That’s what the podcast episode is for.

The unglamorous truth nobody wants to fund.

Greg said the two things AI needs more than anything are the network and clean data. Not the shiny model. The plumbing. And he had the best line of the episode about retailers rushing generative AI on top of a mess:

all you are doing is making faster decisions that are wrong, and that can be devastating.

I’ve been saying some version of this for years and it never stops being true. Getting bad output faster does not help anybody.

Fix the boring stuff first, then go buy your robots.

What I actually think.

The retailers cutting store associates right now to look lean on a slide are the ones who will be playing catch-up for the next ten years.

The winners are doing the unsexy work.

They are connecting their people to data, handing them tools that are at least as good as what the customer is already holding, and getting the store network right before they spend a dime on anything flashy.

Augment your people. The data could not be clearer about who wins.

🔊Hear the whole thing.

The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 8: “The Augmented Associate: Why AI-Ready Retailers Are Hiring More” with Greg Buzek of IHL Group

Part two of our 3-part AI in Retail series with Greg Buzek is live now on the Data Blades podcast. Casey and I get into the edge computing angle, the restaurant table-turn economics, and the returns numbers that genuinely surprised us.

Your Turn.

If this is the kind of retail data you want landing in your inbox, subscribe. We do this every week, and we promise to keep slicing through the research so you don’t have to.

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Comment on this newsletter in Substack or join the conversation on LinkedIn.

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Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast

Join the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail as we cut through the clutter in retail strategy, innovation & leadership to help you maximize growth for your business. Subscribe to The Retail Razor Show podcast! Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

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Missed the last issue?

This week on The Retail Razor Show Casey and I sat down with Allison Varone, who runs marketing for Campari America. If you don’t know the name, you absolutely know the portfolio. Aperol. Campari. Wild Turkey. Grand Marnier. Espolòn. She’s spent more than 20 years in wine and spirits, and she has the receipts on how people actually drink right now, not how the trend pieces say they do. And the trend pieces, it turns out, have been wrong about the big one.

What two days at The Lead Summit taught us about AI in retail, GEO, and the conversations nobody's having.

Casey and I just spent two days at The Lead Summit in New York, and I came home with the exact face you make when the whole industry changes lanes and forgets to use a turn signal.

Here is the short version.

A room packed with the people actually running retail right now, from Anthropologie and Talbots to Hey Dude, Olaplex, and Loop, and almost every single conversation found its way back to AI.

Shocking, I know.

The interesting part was not that everybody talked about AI. It was what they were willing to admit about it once the slides were off.

Every AI project built to replace people is failing.

This theme kept showing up, and honestly it made me feel a little less crazy.

Every story on stage about using AI to cut headcount was a failure story.
Every one.

Meanwhile every story about using AI to make the existing team better was a win.

Same technology, opposite result, and the only variable that mattered was whether a human stayed in the loop.

My favorite example was a retailer proudly reporting 40 percent ticket deflection in customer service. Big number. Looks gorgeous in a board deck. Then somebody checked, and it turned out customers were hanging up on the bot and calling right back to reach a human. The tickets were technically closed. Call resolution times went down. But, customers were furious.

The metric was a magic trick.

Somebody compared this whole moment to when spreadsheets first showed up in business. A handful of people learned how to use them, and suddenly those were the people everybody wanted to hire.

AI is that exact thing again.

The folks on your team who actually learn the tools are about to be golden. Casey and I have some opinions about who is and is not doing this work, and we get into it on the episode.

People are the new luxury, and I will (briefly) take questions.

Casey called this one a decade ago and would like the record to reflect that.

Here’s the thing nobody on a panel wants to say into a microphone. You hit a point in your day where you have had it with AI and you just want a human. We all do it constantly. Casey colorfully admitted she would happily launch her laptop across the room rather than answer one more cheerful little “did that solve your issue?” prompt.

Anthropologie called their stores the heartbeat of the brand. Primark dropped a brand health question I can’t stop chewing on:

if your brand went away today, would anyone care?

Go ahead and ask that about your own brand. If the answer comes slowly, congratulations, you found your to-do list priority.

The brands getting this right are letting AI handle the volume and saving their humans for the moments that actually matter. Talbots is a great example, and the number hiding behind it genuinely surprised me. That one I am saving for the show. Go listen.

Half your customers are already shopping with AI. But do they see you?

Not “about to be.” Already are. Roughly half of consumers are using AI for product discovery, and about half of those are buying off the back of it. (Yes, there are questions on how this is measured. We get into it on the show).

And yet a wild number of brands have done close to nothing about generative engine optimization, the work of making sure AI actually understands and recommends your brand.

Right now it’s something like 5 percent of traffic and 80 percent of the hallway conversation. That gap is the whole opportunity. Holiday is coming fast.

The brands that move now will take share from the brands that wait, and the brands that wait will be writing a very sad recap of 2026 in January.

Casey ran some tests asking LLMs about real brands and the results were rough. The models could not reliably keep Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren, and Lauren by Ralph Lauren straight. If a brand that famous gets blurred, picture what is happening to yours right now while you read this.

The grey swans nobody wants to talk about.

This was the heaviest stretch of the two days, and it came out of a session on grey swans delivered by David Katz, Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Randa Apparel & Accessories.

Black swans are the things you cannot see coming.

Grey swans are the ones you absolutely can see coming and choose to ignore, which is so retail it hurts.

The examples landed hard. GLP-1 drugs and what they quietly do to how people shop and what they buy. The projection that by 2028 there will be more Americans over 65 than under 18. Supply chains built around a single country, or in one memorable case a single road with one way in and one way out. Randa’s CEO summed up the lesson in a line that stuck with both of us:

a business built around a single geography isn’t lean, it’s exposed.

We dig into all three on the episode, plus a size-curve problem Casey raised that I had honestly never considered until she said it out loud.

The stuff we are keeping for the episode.

There are three more themes we pulled out that didn’t make this newsletter. The rewired store and what is finally replacing sales per square foot. Community over audience and why your brand story now has to teach the robots who you are. And the multi-platform, multigenerational reality where a 50 year old and a 30 year old shop the same floor for completely different reasons.

If you want those, plus the part where Casey and I openly disagree about influencers, that’s in the full episode.

What to do Monday morning

Two things, and they’re both free.

First, take every AI project you have running and drop each one into a pile: “replace people” or “help people.” Then kill the replace pile. The proof is already in, and you will thank yourself by day two.

Second, get your GEO started. Not perfect. Started. You have a few months before holiday, and that’s nowhere near as much runway as it sounds.

That’s the recap. The full episode goes deeper on all eight themes and includes the arguments that didn’t make it into this newsletter, because some things are better heard than read.

Listen to the full episode.

The Retail Razor Show, Season 6, Episode 7 BONUS episode: Retail Trends 2026 - 8 Signals From The Lead Summit

Listen to the full episode of The Retail Razor Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Goodpods, YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Transcripts and guest info at retailrazor.com.

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If somebody forwarded this to you and you want the next one in your inbox, subscribe. It’s free, and we do the conference-going so you don’t have to.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

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Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show

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Missed the last issue?

I watched a guy hide from a customer once. Grown adult. First week on the sales floor. A customer walked through the door, and he ducked behind a fixture like she was a velociraptor and he’d wandered into Jurassic Park. I’m not dressing this up for the newsletter. He genuinely hid. I think about that guy more than I’d like to admit, because Ron Thurston is convinced that corner, the one that guy was crouched in, is exactly where great leaders get made.

What the spirits industry figured out about brand marketing and owning the moment.

I went into this episode expecting to talk about spirits and cocktails. I came out of it rethinking how I judge every brand I cover.

That last sentence sounds dramatic. I promise it tracks.

This week on The Retail Razor Show Casey and I sat down with Allison Varone, who runs marketing for Campari America. If you don’t know the name, you absolutely know the portfolio. Aperol. Campari. Wild Turkey. Grand Marnier. Espolòn. She’s spent more than 20 years in wine and spirits, and she has the receipts on how people actually drink right now, not how the trend pieces say they do.

And the trend pieces, it turns out, have been wrong about the big one.

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Gen Z did not quit drinking. They got selective.

Every other headline for the last two years has told you Gen Z is sober and the spirits industry is doomed. Allison looked at that narrative and basically said, nice story, the data disagrees.

What’s actually happening has a great name: zebra striping. People bounce between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks across a single night depending on their mood, the occasion, and how they want to feel the next morning. They did not opt out of drinking culture. They are just being choosier about when they want the real thing and when they want something that looks and feels premium without the alcohol, and tastes great.

That distinction matters, because one of those stories tells a brand to panic and the other tells a brand to build. Campari is building.

The idea I cannot stop repeating: lead with the occasion, not the category.

Here is the line from Allison that I have already quoted to three people who do not work in spirits.

When she advises brand strategists, she tells them to stop leading with the category and start leading with the occasion. Don’t open with what your product is. Open with where people are gathering and what moment your brand belongs in. Then work backward.

That’s why Aperol turned up at Coachella with the whole festival crowd in orange. That’s why Negroni Week takes over entire neighborhoods every September. The drink is almost the supporting actor. The moment is the product.

I think this is the single most useful brand lesson we’ve aired this season, and it has nothing to do with alcohol. Swap in software, swap in a retail concept, swap in whatever you sell.

A 60-year-old Italian drink as a brand-new US launch.

My favorite example of this thinking is Crodino. It’s a non-alcoholic spritz that Italian herbalists created back in 1965, and Campari just brought it to the United States. On paper that’s an odd move. Why launch something six decades old as if it’s new?

Allison’s answer was sharp. They waited until spritz culture and Aperol hit real scale here first, so American drinkers already understood the ritual before the non-alcoholic version showed up. The product is old. The timing is brand new. That is patience most companies do not have.

There is a whole section in the episode on how they decide when a new brand is ready for a market, and I’m not going to spoil the framework here. It’s worth the listen.

Premium does not mean expensive. It means worth it.

We got into premiumization, which is usually code for charge more and hope. Allison flipped it. For her, premium equals value, full stop.

If people believe your brand is genuinely worth it, they will pay. If they don’t, no amount of fancy glass bottle saves you.

She used Espolòn as the example, one of the fastest-growing premium tequilas in the country, built to feel high quality and craft-driven while staying accessible enough that regular people actually buy it on a Tuesday. That balance is harder than it sounds, and most brands faceplant on one side or the other.

The part nobody talks about: they run a school.

Here is a thing I didn’t know. Campari has its own academy that has spent years educating bartenders on how to build elevated drink experiences, including ones with no alcohol at all. While the rest of the industry was arguing about whether non-alc was a fad, Campari was quietly training the people who actually hand you the drink.

Casey had the best reaction to this, and I will let you hear it yourself, because her slow realization across this episode that she is the exact customer this category was built for is honestly the most fun arc of the whole conversation.

What I actually think.

I came in thinking spirits was a sleepy, tradition-bound category that ran on heritage and nice packaging. After all, this is a segment where brand loyalty is king - think about the last vodka you bought versus the last time you tried a new brand. I was wrong, and I’m happy to say it.

This is one of the most culturally sharp, consumer-obsessed corners of branding right now, and most of us in retail and tech are not paying attention to it.
We should be.

The brands in this space have figured out something the rest of us keep fumbling:

People do not want more products, they want better moments, and the brand that owns the moment wins the decade.

Go listen to the full episode. Allison’s section on measuring whether all this experiential stuff actually drives ROI is worth the price of admission by itself, and I left that part out of this newsletter on purpose. It is a podcast after all - you’re supposed to listen (or watch).

Listen to the full episode.

The Retail Razor Show, Season 6, Episode 6: Shaken, Not Stirred — and Maybe Non-Alcoholic: The Future of Beverages & Spirits

Listen to the full episode of The Retail Razor Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Goodpods, YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Transcripts and guest info at retailrazor.com.

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If someone forwarded you this and you want more of it in your inbox, the kind of retail writing that’s bringing you useful tips on branding, leadership, and the latest tech, the subscribe button is right below. It’s free.

So far no one has unsubscribed because of a bad cocktail recommendation.

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Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show

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Missed the last issue?

Greg Buzek went to a home improvement store for one of those magnetic sweepers you roll across the lawn to grab the leftover roofing nails after a roof repair. He had dogs. He was being responsible. The app said the store had fifteen in stock. The shelf had zero. The associate looked. Walked three aisles. Muttered the phrase every American shopper has heard at least once in their adult life. “They’re here somewhere. They’re up on a shelf somewhere.” Fifteen minutes later, Greg gave up, drove down the road, and bought one from a competitor store.

The Most Future-Proof Skill in Retail Is the One Everyone’s Scared to Do.

I watched a guy hide from a customer once.

Grown adult. First week on the sales floor. A customer walked through the door, and he ducked behind a fixture like she was a velociraptor and he’d wandered into Jurassic Park. I’m not dressing this up for the newsletter. He genuinely hid.

I think about that guy more than I’d like to admit, because Ron Thurston is convinced that corner, the one that guy was crouched in, is exactly where great leaders get made. And after recording the latest Blade to Greatness podcast with him, I’m almost annoyed at how right he is.

Ron wrote two best selling books, Retail Pride and Human Pride. He has spent a career on sales floors and in the rooms above them where people decide the fate of sales floors. So when he talks about what actually makes someone good at this work, he’s not theorizing. He’s watched it happen a few thousand times.

His whole argument fits in one sentence that I cannot stop coming back to:

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The school nobody brags about, but should.

Here’s the thing we have all quietly agreed to pretend.

We treat a couple of years working in a store as the thing you did before your real career started. The line on the resume you hope nobody asks about. The summer job. The “while I figured things out” chapter.

Ron flips that on its head, and he does it without a single buzzword, which I respect. His point is that there is no other corner of corporate life where you get handed the exact training the sales floor gives you for free. You walk up to a total stranger. You read them in about three minutes. You figure out what they actually want, which is usually not the thing they said when they walked in.

You get told no. A lot. And then you do it again.

Try finding a leadership seminar that teaches that. You can’t. They sell you a slide deck about “stakeholder alignment” and send you home.

The skill that actually compounds.

The part of the conversation that stuck with me the most was about rejection.

If you work a sales floor, you get told no roughly twenty times a day. Maybe more on a slow Tuesday. And something happens to a person who lives through that for a couple of years. The no stops running their nervous system. It becomes weather. It becomes a thing that happens, not a thing that happens to you.

I have sat in plenty of meetings with senior people who have never developed that.

One pushback in a room and they fold like a beach chair. Meanwhile the person who spent two years getting rejected by strangers in a mall is the calmest one at the table.

That is not a retail skill.

That is a confidence skill, a communication skill, and a resilience skill wearing a name tag. It compounds for the rest of your life, and you can only really build it in one place.

Here is where I land.

Everyone right now is busy future-proofing their career by chasing the next tool, <ahem>, AI. New platform, new model, new certification, rinse and repeat.

I get it. I do it too. But Ron made me sit with something uncomfortable, which is that the tools keep expiring and the human skills do not. The binder, the policy lookup, the “where is my product,” all of that is going to get handled by AI faster than any of us can. Good. Let it. That just frees your team up to do the one thing a machine cannot fake, which is to make another human feel seen.

The leaders who win the next decade will be fluent in both.

Tools and people.

You don’t get to pick one anymore. And if you are early in your career and you want a head start on the human half, Ron’s advice is genuinely the bluntest career tip I have heard in a while.

Go work in a store for a couple of years. Get a great boss. Learn how to sell. It will change your life.

The students he said it to mostly did not believe him. Of course they didn’t. It sounds terrifying. It is terrifying. That’s the entire point.

What I am not going to tell you.

I am leaving the good stuff in the episode on purpose, because I want you to actually listen to it. (Yes, listen to podcast, how novel an idea, right?)

Ron has a framework for spotting where a person on your team is secretly brilliant, even when they have no idea yet. He has one interview question, just one, that tells him almost everything he needs to know about a candidate in the first three minutes.

He is building something with the NRF Foundation to throw students straight into the deep end of all this. And he has a take on where AI genuinely helps a store team that is more useful than ninety percent of the AI takes clogging your feed right now.

All of that is in the conversation with Casey and me. I’m not typing it out here. You have ears - go listen. You’ll be glad you did.

Listen to the full episode

🎙️Blade to Greatness, Season 2 Episode 9: Future-Proof Skills Start on the Sales Floor, with Ron Thurston.

Available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Goodpods. Full transcript and show notes at retailrazor.com.

Your Turn.

If someone forwarded you this and you want more of it in your inbox, the kind of retail writing that is occasionally useful and almost never about synergy, the subscribe button is right down there. It’s free.

So far nobody has unsubscribed over a velociraptor joke. But no promises about future dinosaur jokes.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Lead boldly. Stay human.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

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Missed the last issue?

For the longest time now, it seems every SaaS deck pitched into retail opens by telling the buyer everything wrong with their business. That’s the move. Slide one is the title. Slide two is “here is the problem with your retail business,” followed by some numbers the salesperson or founder probably pulled from a McKinsey report. By slide three the store operator has checked out mentally. By slide five they are nodding and waiting to politely end the meeting.

Shelf Intelligence in 2026: What the Data Actually Says.

Greg Buzek went to a home improvement store for one of those magnetic sweepers you roll across the lawn to grab the leftover roofing nails after a roof repair. He had dogs. He was being responsible. The app said the store had fifteen in stock.

The shelf had zero.

The associate looked. Walked three aisles. Muttered the phrase every American shopper has heard at least once in their adult life. “They’re here somewhere. They’re up on a shelf somewhere.” Fifteen minutes later, Greg gave up, drove down the road, and bought one from a competitor store.

That moment, multiplied by every shopper and every category, is what shelf intelligence is supposed to fix. According to a brand new 2026 Retail Transformation Study from IHL Group, almost nobody has fixed it.

We had Greg on the latest Data Blades podcast to walk through the data, and I want to share what stuck with me, because some of it should make any retail CIO listening to this rethink their 2026 roadmap.

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The Number.

Only 9.1% of retailers have current computer vision deployed in stores.

Read that again. After three years of every conference stage, every trade publication, and every vendor pitch deck shouting about computer vision in retail, fewer than one in ten retailers has it running on a current platform. Electronic shelf labels are only marginally better at 12.2%. RFID adoption sits around 20% across the industry.

The cameras are on the ceilings. The tags are on the products. The ESLs are clipped to the rails. The intelligence to make any of it useful is mostly missing.

So why?

The Network Nobody Wants to Talk About.

Greg’s answer surprised me, even though it shouldn’t have. Especially given my retail tech background in store networking technology.

The network underneath the shelf is the thing nobody is talking about. It may also be the only thing that matters.

Picture an RFID read that returns 10,000 items in a single sweep. You only care about the fifty that moved. Where does that processing happen? In the handheld? At the access point? On an edge server? In the cloud? Every retailer answers that question differently, and the wrong answer turns a brilliant pilot into a stalled deployment.

Computer vision is worse. Robots rolling down aisles, cameras on shelves, video uploaded and processed somewhere, all of it needs bandwidth and compute the store probably was not built for. Greg’s exact line, talking about AI tools more broadly: “everybody wants to use them. Just can’t use their models now.”

If your AI tools are getting throttled because your store network was built for a credit card swipe and a price lookup, the shelf intelligence stack you spent six figures on does not work. Full stop.

This is why Greg’s recommended deployment order for a retail CIO this year breaks from most vendor pitches.

• Network first.

• Edge compute second.

• Then ESLs.

• Then RFID.

• Then computer vision last.

Unless you’re in a high-theft environment where the loss prevention math changes the equation.

Most retailers are running that list in reverse.

The 6.5x Stat I Have Not Stopped Thinking About.

Sales winners (defined in IHL’s study as retailers growing sales 10% or more per year) are six and a half times more likely to be using RFID than their peers.

Six and a half times. Go ahead and read that last line again. I’ll wait.

One of the cleanest correlations I have seen in retail technology research in years. The technology Walmart pushed in the early 2000s, the one everyone wrote off as a failed bet for two decades, is quietly carrying the retailers who are actually winning right now.

Walmart is back to tagging items under a dollar. Macy’s saw nearly a 50% uptick in shoe sales after deploying RFID in the back room. Uniqlo and Zara run RFID checkout because dealing with size and color makes inventory accuracy non-negotiable. And 89% of all retail orders now get fulfilled from a store, which means if your store-level inventory data is wrong, your entire omnichannel pitch is fiction.

We’ve been talking about and writing about RFID for a long time. (see the callout above for a previous podcast episode). This study finally made the case in numbers that none of us cannot argue with.

The Grocery Stat That Actually Broke Me.

80% of the SKUs in a grocery store sell less than one unit a week.

I had Greg repeat that on the recording, because I assumed I misheard him. He repeated it. The number is correct.

Eighty percent. Of the SKUs. Less than one a week.

Five years ago I would have said grocery has an assortment problem. After this conversation, I’m saying grocery has an assortment & inventory crisis. Most US supermarkets look the way they look because that’s how they’ve always looked, with the same fourteen variants of vanilla extract and the same ten yogurt brands taking up real estate the chain has not measured properly in a decade. (Don’t get me started on yogurt and why MY favorite brand is almost always about to run out, while another brand consumes 85% of the shelf space and no one is buying - that’s a post for another day). Greg’s argument, and I think he’s right, is that shelf intelligence is going to force a remodel of the entire grocery format, because retailers will finally have the data to admit how much of their square footage is just sitting there.

There is a version of this future where the front of the store carries the items that actually sell, the back becomes a robotic micro-fulfillment center, and the slow-moving long tail lives in the warehouse and shows up in a basket you pre-ordered the day before. Co-host Casey has been saying for years that she wants a pre-staged basket waiting for her at the store on shopping day. Because the store should know what she regularly buys. So why’s should she have to build that part of her basket on every visit? The data in this study says her future is closer than the industry thinks.

Here’s The Part I Am Not Telling You.

There’s more in this episode I’m deliberately leaving out of this newsletter. In fact, this episode is approximately twice the usual length of a Data Blades episode because, yes, there were that many data insights to discuss.

• The electronic shelf labels controversy that has unions actively pushing back, after years of quietly tolerating the same technology

• Greg’s read on facial recognition for loss prevention, including the 74% theft reduction stat and the cultural divide that keeps it out of most US stores

• The autonomous robot economics that finally make robot-as-a-service viable for chains that do not need a robot every day

• Casey’s “butter inner circle” story, which is the funniest thirty seconds of retail consumer behavior research you will hear all year, and which made me realize my friend group is also doing this with very good olive oil. That last part about the olive oil isn’t in this podcast. I’ll save it for a future episode, or let me know in the comments if you absolutely have to know right now.

You have to listen or watch for the rest. That is the entire point of a podcast., after all.

What I Actually Think.

Most of the shelf intelligence conversation in the industry right now is theater. There are too many retailers running flashy pilots on cameras, smart shelves, and robots while the store network underneath is held together with extension cords, good vibes, and a lot of hope.

The 9.1% computer vision figure has a simpler explanation than “retailers are slow.” The work being done on the floor has been wrong, in the wrong order, for several years running. The retailers winning in IHL’s study put the boring infrastructure first and treated shelf intelligence like an architectural decision instead of a procurement one. That’s the entire game.

If you’re a retail CIO listening to Casey and me ramble in your podcast app, this is the call to action. Open your IT roadmap. Find your shelf intelligence line item. Now look one row above it and ask whether your stores can actually handle what you’re about to deploy. If the honest answer is no, the answer is also why your pilot is stuck.

Greg is back next episode for Part 2, where we get into store associate tools and a hiring data point that genuinely surprised me. And if you’re a regular listener/viewer, you know how serious we are about supporting store teams. Part 3 covers supply chain, returns, and a 555% capability gap between winners and laggards that may be the single most important number in the entire 2026 study. Stay tuned!

Listen to the Full Episode.

🎙️ The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 7: “Shelf Intelligence Reality Check: Why Only 9.1% of Retailers Are Ready” with Greg Buzek of IHL Group

Available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Goodpods, and anywhere you find podcasts. Full transcript and show notes at retailrazor.com.

Your Turn.

If this newsletter made you think, forward it to the CIO on your team who is still trying to figure out why the smart shelf pilot stalled. And if you are not already subscribed, the button is right down there. I write about retail, commerce, leadership, and the technology actually moving them forward, every issue. No fluff, no jargon, no pretending the industry is further along than it is.

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What is your team prioritizing first on the shelf intelligence stack in 2026? Comment on this newsletter in Substack or join the conversation on LinkedIn.

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Until next time: Stay sharp, be data-driven, and remember, always harness a bit of AI charm!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast

Retail Transformers brings you candid conversations with the people reshaping the future of commerce - the crazy ones, the rebels, the change makers, innovators, disruptors, and bold thinkers. Stay Sharp. Be Bold. Transform Retail!

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Missed the last issue?

Andy Laudato, COO of The Vitamin Shoppe and author of Fostering Innovation, joined us on the latest Blade to Greatness episode and casually used a diode to explain the entire philosophy behind every high performing team he’s ever led. I’ve been in retail and tech long enough to have heard a few thousand leadership analogies. But, the diode one is not just new. You might even think it’s a bit weird. You won’t think so after you hear more.

A 25-year Store Leader on why your Retail Tech pitch dies by slide two.

For the longest time now, it seems every SaaS deck pitched into retail opens by telling the buyer everything wrong with their business.

That’s the move. Slide one is the title. Slide two is “here is the problem with your retail business,” followed by some numbers the salesperson or founder probably pulled from a McKinsey report. By slide three the store operator has checked out mentally. By slide five they are nodding and waiting to politely end the meeting.

I learned this the way most uncomfortable truths land in this industry. From someone who has actually run stores. Kit Campoy spent 25 years managing store teams at PacSun, Lucky Brand, Anthropologie, Tilly’s, and more. She wrote The Retail Leader’s Field Guide. She is the writer most people in retail tech quietly read before pitching anyone real. That’s because she writes a popular Substack, The Voice of the Frontline. Recently, she joined Casey Golden and me on the Retail Transformers podcast and the conversation was so full of retail truths, we barely came up for air.

Here is some of what stuck with me.

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Head to retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast to learn more and get your ticket today!

“Welcome in” is a confession, not a greeting.

If you’ve walked into any apparel store in the last three years, you’ve heard it. Someone glances up from a tablet, says “welcome in,” and goes right back to whatever they were doing.

Kit’s take on the phrase is the cleanest version of the problem I have heard. The phrase exists because store teams have twenty things on a task list and zero time to actually engage with a human. It’s a way to check the greeting box and keep moving. The phrase got invented because the job has been so loaded up with ship from store, returns from online, curbside pickup, conversion targets, and email capture quotas that nobody has the bandwidth to look at the customer who just walked in.

The phrase is a symptom. The disease is what got piled on top of the role.

Five departments. Five top priorities. Same week. Every week.

There’s a thing that happens in stores that almost nobody at HQ has ever experienced. Kit named it perfectly. Five different departments at the home office will each drop their top priority on the same store in the same week, and every one of them is convinced theirs is the only one.

• Allocations is moving inventory out.

• Marketing is launching a campaign.

• Ops is rolling out a new POS feature.

• Loss prevention has a new audit.

• HR has compliance training due Friday.

Each of those, in isolation, is fine. Stack them on a Saturday afternoon with a line at the register and one person who called out sick, and you have the actual job. That sound you hear is the moment the store manager is choosing what task(s) to drop.

They are dropping something. They have to. And nobody at HQ ever sees the trade.

What the corporate-to-store disconnect actually comes down to is this. HQ has never had to look at five of its own priorities and pick which one gets cut, in real time, in front of a customer. That’s the part of the job nobody at the home office has ever had to deal with on a busy Saturday afternoon while understaffed.

80% retail turnover did not happen. It was built.

Ron Thurston has been talking about retail turnover hitting 80%, and somehow companies are still treating that number like the weather. Like it just sort of arrived one morning. (catch Ron’s latest leadership tips on our Blade to Greatness podcast).

Kit was direct about this and I am totally with her. Companies built that number. Pay stopped covering rent. The career path got cut up and sold for parts. Training programs got slashed. The store manager role quietly absorbed about twenty other jobs while the title and the salary stayed the same. Then everyone acts shocked when good people leave for a dollar more an hour somewhere else. We’ve only been talking about this on the Retail Razor Podcast Network for the last 5 years.

There was a stat in the conversation that just floored me (and Casey, if you were wondering).

The cost to replace a single sales associate runs about ten thousand dollars.

Companies are letting people walk out the door over a dollar an hour rather than actually paying them, and then turning around and paying ten thousand dollars to replace each one. The math is offensive. Kit said it cleaner than I just did. And the fact is, this isn’t a new number.

This comes from the same retailers that for years now, since the pandemic, have been publicly saying their frontline store teams are the face of their brand and that “this is the year” they were investing in their training, well-being, and augmenting them with technology. You can do the math on which parts have been left out or never materialized.

The twenty jobs hiding inside one job title.

Ask a store manager what they do and they will tell you they manage the store. Watch one for a week and you will see the actual list. And it keeps growing longer.

HR generalist. Recruiter. Trainer. Loss prevention lead. Customer service escalation point before the thing goes viral on TikTok. IT support for the registers, the Wi-Fi, and whatever new device the company shipped last Tuesday. Compliance officer for federal and state labor law, which in California gets genuinely complicated when you employ teenagers with work permits. Counselor for a team that includes kids going through breakups and adults trying to make rent. Coach. Motivator. Schedule architect. Inventory analyst. Visual merchandiser.

Then they are also expected to deliver the numbers.

This is the part of the episode I think every retail VP needs to listen to twice. Kit is not complaining. She loved the work. She’s describing a job that has been quietly redefined while everyone above it pretends nothing changed.

The stuff I am not putting in here.

I’m leaving out the part where Kit walks through how to actually tell the difference between a store team that’s underperforming and one that’s just overwhelmed. It’s the most useful five minutes in the episode for anyone managing district or regional ops, and I want you to hear her say it.

I’m also leaving out the payroll game. The thing store managers across this industry are doing every single week to keep the floor staffed despite a budget that does not match reality. Press play. You may want to listen twice. Or three times.

What I think after sitting with this for a few days

Most of the conversation about retail right now is happening at the wrong altitude. The decks are about agentic AI and unified commerce and the new store of the future. Frankly, we’ve been doing it here at the Retail Razor Podcast Network with plenty of episodes on those topics. Meanwhile there’s a manager somewhere closing alone tonight, who has not had a real day off in three weeks, who is about to lose her best associate because she cannot get her another fifty cents an hour. None of the slides from NRF or Shoptalk are going to fix that. A different set of choices at HQ will.

Kit’s whole point, said about ten different ways, is that the answer is not more software. It’s going to a store, walking in unannounced, talking to whoever is on the floor that day, and listening without an agenda. That’s the practice. That’s the entire practice.

If you build retail tech, lead a brand, or sell into retail, give the episode a listen (or watch). It’s the most honest hour Casey and I have spent recording a podcast this year.

Listen to the Full Episode.

Retail Transformers, Season 2, Episode 5: Voice of the Frontline - 25 Years on the Sales Floor with Kit Campoy

Available on Goodpods, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and everywhere you listen.

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Until next time! Stay sharp. Be Bold. And Transform Retail!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar & Casey Golden
Co-hosts of The Retail Razor: Retail Transformers

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