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!
Missed the last issue?
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. It just got fed data so messy 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.
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.
Recent episodes on brand marketing and shopping with AI
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.
AI should serve the people doing the work.
That 555% gap isn’t luck.
It’s a choice a lot of companies keep quietly deciding not to make.
Missed Part 1 or Part 2?
New to the series? Start with Part 1 on shelf intelligence and Part 2 on the augmented associate, then come back for the finale.
🔊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
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Data Blades is part of the Retail Razor Podcast Network, alongside The Retail Razor Show, Retail Transformers, and Blade to Greatness. Find us at RetailRazor on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram. For a full transcript of this episode, visit our retailrazor.com website!