The Next Retail Battleground: Who Owns the Shopping Cart?
For years, retailers have fought over where customers shop. Increasingly, the more interesting question is who controls the shopping decision before the customer ever reaches a store or website?
That question came up repeatedly in the October 23 episode of Retail Roundup, where I was joined by Suzy Davidkhanian, VP of Content at EMARKETER, and Adam Moyer, Chief Customer Officer at Planalytics. We covered Walmart's new membership bundle, Google's Universal Cart, the holiday sales outlook, and the role weather plays in retail demand. On the surface, that's a pretty eclectic agenda. Underneath, it's a conversation about who gets to understand the shopper—and who gets to act on that understanding.
Walmart isn't just bundling benefits. It's connecting shopping habits.
Walmart recently announced a combined Walmart+ and Sam's Club Plus membership for $120 a year. For consumers, the immediate appeal is straightforward: more benefits for less than the two memberships previously cost together. For Walmart, though, the strategic possibilities go well beyond a more attractive subscription.
Think about the difference between seeing a customer's weekly grocery run and understanding that same customer's warehouse-club purchases, delivery preferences, and other shopping patterns. A more complete picture can potentially inform merchandising, personalization, and retail media. As Suzy and I discussed, the interesting question isn't just whether the bundle attracts subscribers. It's whether Walmart can translate those relationships into better experiences without making shoppers feel like walking data sets.
Google wants to be there before the retailer is
Then there's Google's Universal Cart, discussed in the episode as a way for shoppers to collect products across retailers, watch prices, and evaluate rewards across Search and Gemini. The implications are potentially enormous—even if the experience isn't seamless yet.
Retailers have spent decades trying to become the destination. But if an AI-powered intermediary increasingly helps shoppers compare options and assemble a purchase, the destination may matter less than the product's availability, value, and distinctiveness.
Here's the tension: convenience for consumers can mean less control for merchants. If a platform handles more of the comparison and decision-making, retailers may have to work harder to defend margins and explain why their products deserve to win. Being easy for an AI agent to find is useful. Being meaningfully different is still better.
Holiday growth isn't the same as healthier demand
The National Retail Federation forecasts 2026 November–December retail sales will grow 4.2% to $1.013 trillion. That's a substantial number. But the episode also explored a critical caveat: roughly half the projected growth reflects higher prices rather than more goods being purchased.
That distinction matters. A retailer can report higher sales while moving fewer units, and a strong-looking headline can conceal pressure on households. Executives should be asking what is happening to volume, margin, and repeat purchases—not just celebrating a bigger revenue figure.
And yes, the weather belongs in your AI strategy
Adam Moyer brought a useful dose of physical-world reality to the discussion. Weather can change when people shop, what they buy, and whether a promotion succeeds. A forecast that looks smart in a spreadsheet can fall apart when temperatures or storms shift actual demand.
For retailers investing in AI-assisted forecasting, that is an important reminder: better algorithms won't rescue incomplete inputs. If an AI system is making inventory or marketing recommendations without accounting for conditions that change shopper behavior, it may be confidently wrong.
My takeaway: The next era of retail isn't simply about owning more channels. It's about understanding customers across channels, protecting a differentiated proposition when intermediaries gain power, and making decisions grounded in what shoppers are actually doing. The shopping cart is becoming smarter. Retailers need to be smarter about what that means.
Listen: Google's Universal Cart and the Weather Behind Demand — Retail Roundup (October 23, 2026).
Additional sources: Walmart's October 20 membership announcement and NRF's 2026 holiday sales forecast.
When Should Grocers Automate Fulfillment? The Answer Isn't 'As Soon As Possible'
Grocery delivery is one of those businesses that looks simple until you try to make the economics work. A customer places an order. Someone picks the items. A driver shows up. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, as it turns out. Substitutions, inventory errors, labor costs, unpredictable demand, and the occasional missing avocado all have a way of turning a promising digital channel into an operational headache.
That's why I was interested in a recent conversation I hosted at Groceryshop with Petr Lizner and Dalibor Patek of Rohlik Group, published by Rethink Retail on October 20. We explored a question facing more U.S. grocers: When does micro-fulfillment make more sense than picking online orders directly from store shelves?
Micro-fulfillment isn't a yes-or-no question
The temptation is to frame grocery automation as a binary choice: embrace robots or fall behind. But that's a lousy way to make an investment decision.
In our conversation, Lizner and Patek offered useful volume markers. Around 300 online orders per day, a dedicated fulfillment area becomes worth exploring. Around 600 daily orders, automation may deserve a serious look. Those aren't universal rules; they're practical starting points from operators who have spent years wrestling with the problem.
And the right model depends on geography. Dense delivery markets can support different economics than sprawling regions where pickup is more attractive. A clever warehouse solution doesn't repeal the laws of distance.
The robots are the visible part. The hard part is everything around them.
It's easy to get excited about the machinery: automated storage, efficient picking systems, software that orchestrates the flow. It's harder to get excited about the mundane work that determines whether the investment pays off.
Inventory accuracy. Staffing. Order sequencing. Delivery timing. The handoff between the dedicated fulfillment operation and the physical store.
Those pieces have to work together, day after day. Rohlik's experience illustrates how much institutional learning sits behind a seemingly seamless customer experience. You can't install operational discipline the way you install equipment.
Reliability is a growth strategy
One of the more striking contrasts in the episode involves order errors. The discussion describes some newer online grocery operations struggling with double-digit error rates, while experienced operators such as Rohlik report rates below 1%.
Think about that from the customer's perspective. The best grocery delivery experience isn't necessarily the one with the flashiest app or the most futuristic fulfillment center. It's the one where the ingredients you ordered actually arrive, when you need them.
There's a broader lesson here for retail leaders. We spend enormous energy on acquisition, personalization, and digital experiences. But the operational basics are part of the brand promise. A missing item is a customer-experience problem, not just a supply-chain metric.
My takeaway: automate the constraint, not the headline
Micro-fulfillment could be a major advantage for the right grocer at the right scale. But buying automation before fixing the underlying process can simply make an expensive problem move faster.
The question I wish more companies would ask isn't, “What technology should we deploy?” It's, “Where does our current operating model stop working, and what evidence would justify changing it?”
That's less glamorous than a robot demonstration. It also sounds a lot more like a business strategy.
Listen to the conversation: Is Micro-Fulfillment the Winning Strategy in the US? (Rethink Retail, October 20, 2026).
What Amazon’s Prime Launch in Colombia Reveals About Listening to Customers
There’s a temptation in business to mistake a big strategic plan for a good strategic plan. We build elaborate market-entry models, assemble committees, and spend months debating which country, customer segment, or product line deserves our next investment.
Meanwhile, customers may already be telling us where to go. We just have to notice.
That was one of the most interesting ideas to emerge from a new Rethink Retail conversation I hosted with Kasturi Pal, who leads worldwide marketing for Amazon’s international cross-border business and Amazon Bazaar app. Recorded at Shoptalk and released October 21, 2026, the 15-minute episode explores how Amazon reads demand in markets where it doesn’t necessarily have a full domestic operating footprint.
Why Colombia stood out
Amazon has full operations in 22 countries, but shoppers in more than 100 countries buy from the company. That creates an interesting strategic question: when customers are already finding their way to you, which signals justify investing more deeply?
In Latin America, Pal described how Colombia stood out for its relative resilience amid regional volatility. More importantly, Colombian shoppers demonstrated specific needs: broader selection, faster shipping, and better prices. Those patterns helped inform Amazon’s decision to launch Prime there with its shopping and entertainment benefits, despite not having full in-country operations.
To me, that’s the bigger lesson. Market expansion doesn’t always have to begin with a company deciding where it wants customers. Sometimes it begins with recognizing where customers already want the company.
Good numbers should trigger questions, too
One idea from the conversation deserves a place on more marketing dashboards: when something performs unusually well, don’t just celebrate it. Investigate it.
A campaign’s click-through rate beats expectations. Great. But why? Did the audience change? Did the message resonate differently? Was the timing unusually favorable? And why didn’t a similar approach work before?
It’s easy to investigate failures because they demand explanations. Success is more seductive. We congratulate ourselves and move on, potentially missing the very insight that would make the result repeatable.
Of course, not every data anomaly deserves an endless investigation. Part of analytical maturity is learning how deeply to dig—and when enough evidence is enough.
The case for smaller teams and clearer problems
Pal also described an approach that runs counter to the image of a sprawling global enterprise: teams that can begin with fewer than four people and, in some cases, budgets below $1 million.
The discipline is deceptively simple. Define the customer problem in one sentence. Bring in the people needed to solve it. Keep everyone else informed without turning everyone into a decision-maker.
That last distinction matters. Companies often confuse collaboration with universal participation. But the more people required to approve a decision, the harder it becomes to respond to the customer signal that prompted the work in the first place.
What other businesses can take away
Not every company has Amazon’s data, resources, or cross-border customer base. And one market’s success is not a plug-and-play formula for another. Still, the underlying principles travel surprisingly well.
Watch what customers actually do, especially when their behavior surprises you. Ask why your best results happened, not just your worst. And resist the urge to make a straightforward customer problem organizationally complicated.
We talk endlessly about becoming more data-driven. The more interesting ambition might be becoming more curiosity-driven: using data to ask better questions, then building teams capable of acting on the answers.
Retail Media Has a Creativity Problem, Not Just a Measurement Problem
Retail media is very good at explaining why an ad reached the right shopper. It's often less convincing at explaining why that shopper should care.
That tension is at the heart of the October 12 episode of Rethink Retail's Media Mondays, where I spoke with Lisa Zielinski of Ipsos about its Creativity Over Clicks research and what it means for brands and retail media networks.
The episode description points to research involving more than 21,000 simulated shopping trips on Amazon and Walmart. That's a useful backdrop for a question the industry should be asking more often: are we building better advertising, or merely better ways to deliver it?
Targeting isn't the same thing as persuasion
Retail media's pitch is compelling. Retailers know a great deal about shopping behavior and can connect advertising activity to transactions in ways that many other channels struggle to match.
But knowing when someone might buy something isn't the same as giving them a reason to choose your brand. An ad can be well targeted, correctly attributed, and utterly forgettable—all at the same time.
When every network is competing on data, inventory, and measurement, creative effectiveness deserves a much bigger seat at the table.
The danger of optimizing only what is easiest to count
Clicks, conversions, and return on ad spend are useful signals. They are not a complete description of what advertising does.
Sometimes the goal is to build familiarity. Sometimes it's to introduce a product that shoppers didn't know existed. Sometimes it's to shift perceptions before a purchase is even under consideration.
Reducing the entire exercise to the nearest measurable transaction risks rewarding the ads that are easiest to attribute rather than those that create the most durable value.
What should change?
I'd like to see retailers and brands treat creative quality as a strategic variable, not an afterthought once the audience and media plan have been decided. That means testing ideas, questioning repetitive formats, and making room for distinctiveness even in environments built for conversion.
The next phase of retail media shouldn't simply be about adding more screens and more impressions. It should be about making those impressions matter.
My takeaway: retail media has spent years proving it can find shoppers. Now it needs to prove it can move them.
Find “Retail Media’s $170 Billion Creative Problem” in the Rethink Retail podcast feed.
The AI Revolution Runs on Silicon. That's a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds.
It's easy to talk about artificial intelligence as if it lives entirely in the cloud. Models improve, chatbots get smarter, and new applications seem to arrive every day.
But “the cloud” has an inconvenient habit of needing very real things: chips, factories, electricity, water, supply chains, and geopolitical stability.
In the October 13 episode of FUTUREPROOF., I spoke with Rakesh Kumar, a professor of computer engineering at the University of Illinois and author of THE CHIP AGE: HOW SEMICONDUCTORS BECOME THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL RESOURCE, about why semiconductors have become such a consequential resource.
Software gets the attention. Hardware sets the limits.
We tend to evaluate AI by what we can see: an answer on a screen, a generated video, a task completed in seconds. Underneath those experiences sits a complicated industrial system that can't be scaled by simply adding a few lines of code.
Advanced chip manufacturing takes specialized equipment, deep expertise, capital, and time. That means AI competition isn't just a race between software companies. It's also a race among the countries and businesses capable of supporting the underlying infrastructure.
Why geopolitics is now a product concern
The conversation explores Taiwan's central role in semiconductor supply chains and the difficult questions raised by export controls. Attempts to protect strategic technology can reshape incentives across the global market, sometimes in unintended ways.
For business leaders, this is not abstract foreign-policy trivia. The availability and cost of computing power affect what companies can build, how fast they can build it, and whether their economics make sense.
What if the bottleneck is electricity?
One of the most interesting questions in the episode is whether power availability, rather than algorithms, could become a defining constraint on AI growth. It's a useful reminder that digital transformation ultimately collides with the physical world.
There's an irony here. We often describe AI as the ultimate productivity technology, yet the industry's own growth depends on solving some decidedly old-school infrastructure challenges.
My takeaway: if you want to understand where AI is going, don't just watch the model launches. Watch the chip supply chain, energy capacity, and international policy decisions. Those may tell us more about the pace of change than the next impressive demo.
Listen to FUTUREPROOF., including “Why AI Chips Are the New Oil.”
Retail's Next Competitive Advantage Isn't Another Price Cut
Retail has a habit of treating every new problem as a technology problem. Margins under pressure? Automate. Competition heating up? Optimize. Customers drifting away? Personalize.
But what happens when the most consequential problems can't be solved by buying another platform?
On the October 16 episode of Rethink Retail's Retail Roundup, I was joined by Kimberly Morgan of The Fashion Tech Exec, EMARKETER's Zak Stambor, and Retail Prophet founder Doug Stephens to examine three pressure points facing retailers: the fallout from the failed Kroger–Albertsons merger, the security risks of connected stores, and the role of people in building lasting advantage.
The grocery problem goes deeper than scale
Albertsons is seeking up to $9.3 billion from Kroger after their proposed merger collapsed. That's an eye-catching number, but the more interesting question is what happens to grocers caught between value-focused competitors and enormous players such as Walmart and Amazon.
Scale matters, of course. But scale without a reason for shoppers to choose you is a precarious strategy. If the pitch is merely “we're also a grocery store,” you're asking customers to do your differentiation work for you.
Connected stores have a connected risk problem
Digital infrastructure can make stores more efficient. It can also create new points of failure. The episode considers a cyberattack involving supermarket refrigeration equipment in France—an unusually tangible reminder that a breach isn't always confined to customer records or a corporate laptop.
As retailers connect more systems, security becomes part of store operations, not merely a concern for the IT department. The smarter the store gets, the more seriously its operators need to think about resilience.
The part competitors can't simply purchase
Doug Stephens also makes a provocative argument: when retailers can access many of the same tools, the advantage increasingly comes from how their people use them. That should complicate the assumption that every investment in labor is a cost to minimize.
Technology may be increasingly available to everyone. Trust, judgment, service, and an organization capable of using technology well are not.
My takeaway: retailers should absolutely keep investing in better systems. But they shouldn't confuse the system with the strategy. The winners will be the ones who can explain why customers should care—and give their teams the ability to deliver on that promise.
Listen to “Hackers, Tariffs, and a $9.3 Billion Grocery Fight” on Rethink Retail.
Rocco and Frankie's Bris
Hi everyone! The link you followed to get here will link to the live stream at 12pm on May 22nd. Please go to https://rebrand.ly/roccoandfrankie at that time.
Thanks,
The Haragolds
The Future of Guns & School Safety [PODCAST]
We recently posted a new article over on Firebrand Group's blog, entitled The Future of Guns & School Safety [PODCAST]. We discussed the recent Parkland shooting with Aly Sheehy, a student who survived the attack, and it's arguably my favorite episode yet. I'd love to know what you think.
"I Hate My Life"
8 of the 10 states where "I hate my life" showed up the most in Google searches over the last 12 months voted for Trump (click the menu icon to drill down for a list of states).