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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.
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:
“It was a vibe. I feel like we need two more people tomorrow.”
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.
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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.
What retail transformation really looks like.
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.
How Does your brand reach Gen Z?
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.
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Next episode: we’re going deep into the real-world advantages of robotics in grocery retail.
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Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!
Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show
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The Retail Razor Show is part of the Retail Razor Podcast Network, alongside Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades. Find us at RetailRazor on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram. For a full transcript of this episode, visit our retailrazor.com website!