In this episode, Chris Walton, Co-CEO of Omni Talk, talks about the evolution of customer convenience in retail, his take on technological trends, and what he calls the “Show Me the Money” Year.
On today’s episode, we talk with Chris Walton, Co-CEO of Omni Talk and a Top 100 Retail Influencer. Chris Walton co-founded Omni Talk in 2017 and has quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in retail. Omni Talk has been read by nearly 4 million on Forbes, with podcasts and videos that consistently rank as one of the most listened to retail outlets within the industry. Chris Walton is an accomplished Senior Executive and one of the leading omnichannel experts in the world, with nearly 20 years of success within the retail and retail technology industries.
In this episode, Chris talks about the evolution of customer convenience in retail, his take on technological trends, and what he calls the “Show Me the Money” Year.
Guest Bio:
Chris Walton is a leading expert and influencer in omnichannel retailing. An accomplished Senior Executive, with nearly 20 years of success within the retail and retail technology industries, Chris has high-level executive experience across nearly every discipline within retail. Currently he is the Co-CEO and Founder of Omni Talk, one of the fastest growing blogs in retail. He is a regular keynote speaker, a senior contributor for Forbes, and he also sits on the Advisory Boards for Sezzle, Delivery Solutions, and Xenia Retail.
Prior to starting Omni Talk, Chris worked for Target, where he was the Vice President of the retailer’s Store of the Future project and also the Vice President of Merchandising for Home Furnishings on Target.com.
Chris began his career at Gap, Inc. and holds a BA in Economics and History from Stanford University, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
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Guest Quote
“The convenience dynamics have changed in the minds of the consumer, and it's a universal truth to me that we, and particularly the younger generations, want to consume everything on their schedule and on demand to the best of their abilities.
And so that means that retailers are gonna continue to have to adapt to this. And we're really only in the first inning of that adaptation. It's gonna be really interesting to see how it plays out from here and what comes next. I would still be investing in anything that helps answer that question of how do I make myself more convenient for my consumer.
I'd make that top of mind.” - Chris Walton
Time Stamps
**(02:07) - The birth of Omni-Talk
**(07:39) - A Chris-eye view of the current retail landscape
**(16:41) - The importance of the physical space
**(26:37) - What’s working in innovation?
**(35:28) - What is Chris excited about?
**(43:01) - Final thoughts with Sid
Sponsor:
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Links
Narrator: Welcome to Elevating Brick and Mortar, a podcast about how operations and facilities drive brand performance. On today's episode, we talk with Chris Walton, Co-CEO of Omni Talk and a top 100 retail influencer. Chris Walton co-founded Omni Talk in 2017 and has quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in.
Omni Talk has been read by nearly 4 million people on Forbes with podcasts and videos that consistently rank as one of the most listened to retail outlets within the industry. Chris Walton is an accomplished senior executive and one of the leading omnichannel experts in the world. With nearly 20 years of success within the retail and retail technology industries, he's well-versed across nearly every discipline within retail, including merchandising, store operations, inventory management, product design, forecasting, e-commerce, pricing and promotions, product development and store design and architecture. In this episode, Chris talks about the evolution of customer convenience and retail, his take on technological trends, and what he calls the "Show Me the Money" Year. But first a word from our sponsor.
Want to rest easy knowing your brick and mortar locations are offering the best possible guest experience. Partner with ServiceChannel for peak facilities performance. Check out servicechannel.com today to learn more. Now, here's your host, industry and FM technology, thought leader and chief business development officer at Service Channel Sid Shetty, along with our guest Chris Walton.
Sid: Hello everyone. Welcome to the show. I am here today with Chris Walton, co CEO of Omni Talk. Chris, welcome. Thanks, Sid. It's
Chris: great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sid: Really appreciate it. So, Chris, let's just dive right in. You have tremendous experience in the retail space, working at big names like Target and Gap, and then in 2017, You started Omni Talk.
What inspired you to do that? Yeah, I gave it
Chris: all up. I gave up that, I gave up that 20 year career in retail and when I did the crazy thing of Start Mountain Blog, which started as a blog and now it's turned into a full-fledged media company. Yeah. The origin for that was I had met my business partner on Omni Talk and MEA at Target.
We had been working on a project called The Store of the Future, which was a two year project where it was a great job. We were both charged with. Answering the question five to 10 years out, why do people still come to physical stores to shop, and how would you conceive of the target brand in trying to answer that question?
And so we got a two year indoctrination of on the ground training of Greenfield, thinking around everything that works and doesn't work when you start talking about retail technology and experience design for scale. And so when that project ended, Anna and I noticed that there was a gap in the marketplace.
Real authentic commentary in the media about how retail was changing. For example, like when that project ended, it was it, the project was known as the robot store in the media. Like we were getting a lot of flack for Target killed their robot store. And I can tell you firsthand, there wasn't a single robot in that store, Syd, but somewhere the media got this idea and, and so that just emboldened me.
And one day I decided to sit down in a coffee. And I made a blog and I decided to call it Omni Talk, which believe it or not, was inspired by Lin the Linda Richmond side Night Live Coffee talk back in the day with Mike Myers. If you remember that. That's where the name comes from. And I wrote my first article and it was comparing Amazon to the Vietnam War.
That was my take on it. And. and the next thing I knew, people started reading those articles every week and I started writing them pretty voraciously. From there on, I think I probably wrote three or 400 articles the first couple years of doing this, and we later got into podcasting and video production and now we've, like I said, we've got a full-fledged media business on our hands, but it's all about the future of retail and we think our point of view is, To be candid and frank and to provide the perspective of real retail operators who have been in the business as opposed to journalists may or may not have any retail experience, may have been writing for Good Housekeeping before they got on the retail beat, as an example, or even consultants that oftentimes bring their own biases to the discussions in a lot of ways.
So that's the origin story there in a nutshell.
Sid: and I read about how you explain about omni talk and the kind of conversations you want to have. One of the things you say is you wanna be very open, very transparent, and very frank, and not necessarily conform to some of the rhetoric that's out there,
Chris: right?
Yep, that's exactly right. And that started, like I said before, that started out in the writing. So I started taking a very candid approach in the writing and calling it like I was, and. Almost made a lot of enemies throughout the years, but I think over time, like a lot of the companies I was very critical of, particularly Walmart now are some of our people that we like talking to the most at this point in time.
And, and the reason for that is, is because it's a great pulpit and there's a real need in it for people to understand cuz it things are changing so much and changing so rapidly that there's a lot of dissonance in people's minds, especially when you think about it from the retail executive standpoint, which is how we approach our work.
What are these people thinking about day-to-day in their jobs? Help do they need in the decisions they're making as they're trying to allocate capital to keep up with all the change that's happening around them. And the pandemic for the most part was depends on who you are, but for us it was really good because a lot of the things we were writing and talking about in our podcast, Came true.
And so the pandemic validated a lot of our points where before they were kinda like, oh, these are the guys that are off in the corner talking about futuristic stuff. And we're like, no, no, no. This stuff's really real. It's gonna happen. And then the pandemic just right, supercharged it all, and it really made a big difference for us in the marketplace.
Sid: So Chris, tell us about Omni Talk and the target audience. I wanna double click on the other things you mentioned before, but what is your ultimate goal? What do you wanna achieve in terms of what do you want your audience to take away from the conversations you're having and you know, five years from now when you look back and say the impact that you had on the space.
What is
Chris: that? That's, that's a really good question. No one's ever asked me that. Our motto when we started Omni Stock was, follow your interest and you'll always be interested. And Anne and I both are incredibly interested in what omnichannel retailing means, and we happen to like that word, which is why we call it omni talk.
And so by that I mean if you think about omnichannel as true definition, it's really the combination of the human, the physical, and the digital elements that come together to create retail. And so that's what we specialize in. That's what we wanna educate the market on. And most importantly, that's also what we want to learn about and stay close to.
And so when you ask who is our audience? Our audience is the mass retailers. It's not the digitally native brands. In fact, A lot of times people ask us to reach, help them reach those companies, and we're like, Nope, that's not our bag. That's not what we do. We're focused on mass. You've gotta have, generally, a store operation as well as a website stood up in addition to many other capabilities.
But that's what we're looking at. So we're trying to reach the targets, the Walmarts, the Krogers, the Walgreens, the CVSs, the Worlds Home Depots, Lowe's, that's who's listening to us. That's who's paying attention to us. Top 100, even the top 500 retailers that are out. And so when I look five to 10 years out, I don't know, I don't have any auspicious goals.
If you told me six years ago that I'd still be doing this and be doing this as successively as we have been and making the names for ourselves as we have, I would've said you were crazy. So for me, it's just about doing the work that we love, keeping that interest going. That's how I judge the work that we're doing is look back on the last year, did I learn something?
Did I help other people potentially learn something? And I think that authentic approach also serves us very well because when people listen to our. It. We are who we are, and people see us at trade shows all the time. They're like, oh my God. You're like, exactly like you are on your podcast. We're like, yeah.
It's kind of who we are. .
Sid: That's right. Authentic. You speak to a lot of folks in the industry and you read a lot of trade shows. Mm-hmm. , and you have a significant presence online. How would you describe what you're seeing in today's retail landscape?
Chris: Yeah, somebody asked me that question the other day and the way I like to think about it, when I think about retail in general, always migrates around universal truths.
And those universal truths for the most part are price and convenience. Like those are gonna win the day. And when you look back at the last 20 to 30 years pricing at this point, I know what we're gonna get is consumers, right? You've got Walmart on one side of, you got Amazon on the other, but the convenience angle is what's really morphed a lot.
That's where digital's really changed things, and it started with Amazon, with their two day shipping. But then as the pandemic came about, that changed the game entirely in terms of, okay, there's a whole host of new ways to think about this podcast is called Elevating Brick and Mortar. There's a whole host of new ways to think about the store within the convenience of one's life, and that's where you see things like curbside pickup, right?
Shipping from store, shortening those shipping windows even more, having it come to you on your schedule. And so that's what's been inspiring me to start this year, is thinking about it from that. Okay. We're really talking about the continued evolution of convenience shaping retail. And when I step back and think of it that way, it's incredibly interesting to me because you start to get all these other aspects that come into it, okay, how are stores going to change then?
It's probably a good bet that the back rooms are gonna start to get bigger, as an example. And we've already heard companies like Target and Sam's Club taking that approach. Parking lot design is going to start to change as well, right? You gonna be more emphasis on curbside pickup, you're gonna. Lockers situated to enable curbside pickup.
You might even have automation playing into that where there's devices that are taking the orders from the store out to people's vehicles. You've got Target doing Starbucks via curbside. Like all of that's evolving too. And then the last point to me that I find really interesting as well is. . Then you've got the in-store experience too, about how do you make that more convenient?
And then you get into the checkout and how checkout is radically changing as well. From scan paid go options to computer vision, like Amazon's just walkout technology. The world is endless when you start thinking about how that's gonna change. But man, those three things are all really big changes that are starting to happen in the physical world.
All because the stores have reasserted their dominance in that discussion in a way that they hadn't.
Sid: you mentioned today what's important is price and convenience. Mm-hmm. question for you. What about value and experience? What do you think about the experience part of it as well? Because you know our hypothesis mm-hmm.
and our whole position is the physical space has a lot to do with a customer's experience with the brand. Yep. And what they feel and the sentiment associated with it. And so I'd love to hear your take on that as. Yeah, for
Chris: sure. Value. First of all, hit the value side of that first. Value is really the how everything wraps together.
Value is a function of price, convenience, the brand that's all in the calculation that we as consumers make, and it's important, but it's all determined uniquely by us as individuals. The universal truth is all gonna go towards what gives us the highest value, but how I define value is gonna be different than yours.
What I find is interesting is the subcategories right, and I. And you're right. Experience and brand is one of those, and brands are probably a little bit different than experience. I think experience gets thrown around too loosely a lot of times. But brand's important, right? Like if you're gonna buy from, are you gonna buy from Nike or are you gonna buy your kids' kids?
What, as an example like that, that matters to you inherently is how you identify as a consumer. So that's still a factor. I just don't think that's changed as rapidly. I think that's stayed consistent in terms of how we view that as a consumer throughout the last 10, 20, 30 years. Digital hasn't really changed our perceptions of the brands.
It's probably changed how we interact with them by way of social media and digital commerce. But overall, I think fundamentally it's not that different. The experience question is interesting though, because then you get into, okay, what is the experience of the physical store and how much does that matter?
And that cannot matter for some, it cannot matter for others. It really depends on what the brand's proposition is with their physical store. And I think there has been a tendency for some retailers to lean into that to be the answer too much. That's why you've seen everyone try, like the bar in the store, the coffee shop in the store, like the restaurant in the store.
But that only works in the, when the right criteria are around that experience. So in a lot of ways, I think sometimes we can get too carried away with. When at the end of the day, you want the experience of your retail environment to provide you the value. Going back to what you said before, that's across all those dimensions, but each retailer's gonna play that out very, very differently.
Yeah,
Sid: I hear what you're saying. I mean, if I were to summarize what I heard you say is, yeah, you need to have your core values and value proposition to the customer, right? And then all the things you do to elevate that experience, as long as your core values. Then add to your brand. You, you can't just say Our core value is shaky, but we're gonna put a coffee shop in there and that's gonna change the experience.
You need to get the basics
Chris: right as well. Right. That's a hundred percent exactly what I'm saying. I've heard a lot of pundits over the years, for example, say like the physical environment's all about experience, but is it for every store? Is that really true? Is Walmart really about experience or is it.
Getting the best price as convenient as I can in the market that I'm in. I would argue that's what it's about. It's not about me getting a coffee in the Walmart store. It may be a part of that, but it's not inherently what brings me to the Walmart store. And that question of what brings us to the physical location to begin with is the most important question.
And that's what gets forgotten in that conversation when the pundits just fall to experie. As the answer. And that's why a lot of times in the media too, when you talk about, when you hear about new store designs, you hear a lot about new store concepts that are beautiful and interesting to look at. But at the end of the day, that's all that's different about them.
They're not fundamentally changing the way consumers shop. They're just more branding exercises a, around the idea of the experience. , and so I think that's something that people have to look at, I think a little more closely in our opinion.
Sid: Something very interesting you just mentioned about experience and what really defines what experience is, right?
Mm-hmm. , because there are two parts to it, right? Yeah. I think one is the experience you have as a consumer in terms of what you expect to feel when you walk in. Meaning if I'm walking into a value chain, I'm not necessarily expecting an experience. , I have a hundred different things thrown at me. Right.
And it takes me four hours to get out of the location because this is so much to do. Right. But what I am expecting as a consumer is to feel warm, welcome, safe, and for it to be a clean environment. Mm-hmm. where I can walk in and do what I have to do, find what I need to buy, and walk out and feel like, yeah.
I felt good about spending my money in there. And then you've got the other side, which is the whole experiential part of right, retail and grocery and restaurants where it's like new concepts, new types of ways to engage your customer. They're two different things. They are, but both are important. But again, it goes back to.
Do you have your basics right? But at minimum, I think you need to handle the former, right? You need to have your customer walk in and feel like you care about what they feel and the sentiment, and you care that the space is clean and warm and welcoming. If you don't do that right, and you have all this other stuff, it doesn't really matter.
No.
Chris: Yeah. I think the way I frame up what you said is I think you have to be empathetic. and that empathy can change, right? Take many forms, right? Even like even the cleanliness argument. You could argue that maybe not, but there are some retailers where maybe they're not so clean, but that's because they're giving that.
Money they would put towards the cleanser store into the price of their products, as an example. That can happen. That same retailer could be empathetic to the plight of their customers. Say like, okay, I know price is the most important thing for you. You're on a budget. You're gonna give me some leeway here in terms of.
The cleanness of my eyes, the brightness of my store, because that's what's most important to you. The other element too that I think is important to call out too, is experience doesn't just begin and end in the physical store itself. It also translates into the digital touchpoints that the retailer has with the consumer too.
That's what makes it omnichannel, and so you gotta have your ducks in a row on the digital side as well. Because that can create a lot of dissonance if you're not careful as a retailer. The word experience has a lot of layers to it, and it's great that we're unpacking them here.
Sid: Yeah, for sure. You know, as you know, our show is called Elevating Brick and Mortar, and a large part of our audience is from facilities and construction.
Mm-hmm. in store operations, and part of what I think. Resonates with our audience and something that we care deeply about is to tie the physical space to the brand, to the sentiment, right? And you're right, what experience means and what the physical manifestation of your brand in terms of the location actually does for your brand.
Can be different for different brands. Long as you're having the conversation about what do we want our customers to feel? Yeah. What is important to our customer when they walk in and acknowledging that physical space in that moment in time when the consumer is at your doorstep, that's the representation of your brand.
Yep. It doesn't matter what's on your website. All the other digital experiences, that physical location, that's what the customer sees. Right?
Chris: Yeah. I don't know this for a fact, but I'd argue it's probably the most palpable, impress. that a retailer leaves with you, right? Because it's what you visual, it's sensory.
It's what's visually in front of you, and that's why that when you walk across that threshold, that's why that's so important.
Sid: A hundred percent agree. Let's pivot a little bit and talk about innovations. What are the biggest innovations in retail and grocery that you are seeing and hearing about when you talk to folks from the space that, that are exciting you right now?
And what do you think is here to stay? What do you think is maybe a test and might not really
Chris: stick? Yeah, that's a great question too. You know, I think it's probably important to tackle this one from a 30,000 foot view too. I think when you look at most of retail and groceries, no different. This is what I've been calling, I started saying this at N R F.
I've been calling this to show me the money year for technology innovation. A lot of money's been invested. And now companies really want to see the payoff because they're dealing with a number of issues. And those issues are particularly staffing and rising wage rates, inventory availability on shelf, the supply chain's gotten better, but understanding the actual inventory on shelf is a whole nother issue.
Inflation continues to rear its ugly head. And then the other thing too, which just goes along the lines of what you said with safety, Theft is also a mounting problem in stores as well. And so how retailers are coping with all those issues is what's driving. I think the lion share the focus and it's no different in grocery.
So the, to answer your question specifically, now, the innovations that I'm interested in, or I'm flying the most closely are, okay, what are the solutions that. That help with that. And so for example, like one of the ones that I'm a big proponent of, and actually grocery dive, just put an article out that on this recently is electronic shelf labels.
I've been predicting for a while that those are about to have their day in the sun because there's so many use cases off of them. And anytime a technology has multiple use cases, it tends to be a valuable technology. And of course with the electronic shelf levels, you have the fact that you don't have to have staff put up paper signs in the.
So that's good. That job also is terrible to do. I've done it. That's right. Personally. So that's one. But then also the other attributes of it that people are just starting to uncover is like, okay, this can be really helpful with restocking efficiency or having third party pickers in your store, directing them where to go so they're more efficient.
So it gets the efficiency in the labor, which I think is a really important thing. Labor's hard to come by, so it's gotta become more productive. The other areas that I'm just casually interested in observing as well with, particularly within grocery, you've got some grocers like Chinook's Market outta St.
Louis that are using robots to scan the aisles or the shelves, all using computer vision technology for that. You can do that with robots, you can do that with your phones. You can do that with cameras in the ceiling, similar to like Amazon Go, like I mentioned before. But I think that will start to find its way into the language a lot more in the coming years because inventory accuracy in store is just not where it needs to be to keep pace with the omnichannel desires of the consumer.
And by that I mean the curbside pickup. The pickup in store, the ship from store options that consumers are now demanding. because retailers just don't know what's on their shelves. And so that leads to a bad customer experience in the end of the day if they have to cancel orders or people arrive at the store and they don't find what they thought they were ordering.
So that's gonna continue to play out. The other thing I would say is I, I'm particularly interested in following how the back rooms continue to evolve, not just at grocery, but all retail. I think it's a good bet, like I said before, that they're gonna start to get bigger. And that's the first stage because you have to accommodate all the new omnichannel processes that are going on in those back rooms that never existed before.
But a lot of times they're legacy infrastructures physically, but they're gonna have to change, they're gonna have to be rebuilt, and then they're gonna have to next stages, they'll have to be staffed to those new processes, trained to those new processes. And then over time, I think you'll see more automation going into the buildings in the back of house as.
To again, get more efficiency from the labor. All
Sid: the things you just mentioned. Completely agree. All businesses are having some challenges, a lot of challenges, right? Mm-hmm. around labor shortage. There's a shortage in the skilled trades, supply chain issues and disruption. So businesses are having to do a lot more to leverage technology and data to get ahead of it.
And all the, the robotics and innovation that's happening on the back of house I think have a huge potential to be the answer to a lot of the problems. And I think there's a lot of longevity there. Any consumer facing innovations that you're seeing that excite you? Great
Chris: question. No, that's funny. God, you're nailing it.
Like I was actually thinking about this this week. Many, and I actually talked about this on my podcast too, with regards to the just walkout technology. You know, it seems like Amazon, Amazon announced recently for those that maybe don't know Amazon had, was going after grocery again in this, the grocery space going after grocery really heavily with this idea of Amazon Fresh, which was their re-imagination of the grocery store with their just walk out technology and they announced that they're pausing that.
And my big aha from that as I was thinking about it, Okay. The consumer might not be ready for just walk out, at least in the way it's been designed so far where you. Scan a mobile app to get in the store, and then it's cool, you just walk out if you know how to use it. But it's kind, it's a pretty big barrier.
And when you start talking about larger basket sizes in grocery and you start talking about the next best alternative, which is a self-checkout machine, which for the most part work pretty well nowadays. So it's not saving me that much time. I don't know if the consumer's really ready for that. And I think Amazon, rightfully is probably going through that discussion in their own heads.
And so for me, There isn't as much coming on the consumer facing side of innovation as there's going to be on the operational side of innovation because retail in general is, like I said, in a position where things are tough right now. It's a show me the money year. So they're gonna go and do and invest in the things that make them operationally better over the things that maybe are a leap out on the consumer side of things.
And I think that's the right thing to. As a pundit who likes talking about this stuff. I hate it because it's not as interesting. , but I can't fault him for it. I, that's what I would do too, right. As an executive.
Sid: Hey, I'm your host Sid Shetty, and I hope you're enjoying this conversation so far to make sure you're up to date and have access to all our episodes.
Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast also, if you have thoughts, comments, or questions, be sure to follow Service Channel on LinkedIn. So you can be part of our community of like-minded folks as well as have access to a lot of other great content. Feel free to also connect and follow me on LinkedIn.
I'm your host, Sid Shetty, and now back to the show.
What you said is really interesting because there are a few different brands that are trying to hold frictionless checkout, just walkout technology and so on, right? And then there's different technologies they're using. Of course. Yeah. Like with some of the walkout technology, like you've hundreds of cameras in the ceiling.
And this will resonate with our audience too, because guess. All of that equipment, someone needs to take care of it. If you have two cameras that go out and there's a blind spot, guess what? There's a direct impact to sales and I guess shrinkage. And the consumer doesn't even know that they didn't pay for something.
They're sticking a step back. Is it that the consumer is not ready for this innovation and this experience, or is it just that we haven't figured out how to. Profitably yet.
Chris: I think it's probably a little bit of both. Amazon's in the consideration set here. Like if Amazon had a customer love problem with this, they wouldn't care about the profitability.
So it makes me think that there's a little bit on the consumer is the consumer ready side. But then the question that I start thinking about in my headset is, is it that the consumer's not ready or does the consumer ever want it? And that's where I don't know the answer. And even if you go to the most simplest forms, like scan and go technology, which require much less infrastructure to set up, the majority of people still when they're shopping don't do that.
And the average grocery experience through a self checkout machine is pretty darn good at this point in time. Now for me, Having used Amazon go in the airport in Chicago, I'll never go back. I'll never go back. You wave your hand, I can just put my hand over the thing and it lets me in the store and I take a bottle of water, some chips I get on the plane.
It takes me like 20 seconds. I never want anything different, but I'm not the average person either. And so I think there's, some of this is what's really hard to figure out. There's some of, is a consumer not ready for it? Where in that environment? I think that's the answer. Like at some point in the event space, the airport, Consumers will gravitate towards that because it's better.
But then when you talk about grocery and the rest of shopping, there's a part of me that's still. Do we ever need that? Is that too much operationally and to your point, too costly for the retailer to make it worth their while? I don't know. And that's what we're gonna find out. Yeah. There's
Sid: a lot of interested things happening, right?
You've got restaurants that are having this kiosk first approach. So customer walks in and orders on a kiosk. to having robotics in the back of house. Handa has a auto walk. Yeah. Chipotle has chippy. Right. You know, white Castle I think has flippy there. There's a lot of different things that's happening.
And then you've got like some other robotics that's on last mile delivery. Like food being delivered. Mm-hmm. to customers using automation and robots and drones.
Chris: Yeah. We're talking about drones.
Sid: Yeah. But people are also like kicking these unmanned vehicles and turning them on their side and yeah, the food's not gonna get to you.
It's an interesting time. People are testing things out to mm-hmm. As a consumer. And then brands are also testing to see like what actually works. Right?
Chris: Right. And then it all comes back to what problem you're trying to solve and is it the most efficient use of your capital to solve it. I've been very pointed and very critical, for example, of the drones announcements.
And that's why we do what we do, because there's a lot of things that get. In the media to make you sound like a cool technology company as a retailer, but when you click into them, like using your phrase, double click into them, you realize that there's not really much there. And at the best, there's very low customer usage.
That's my hunch with the drones. And there was just a report that Amazon's made 10 drone deliveries in the last year. That's all you know, because it's just not something that works to the degree that it needs to. And I would argue the same thing with some of the robotic delivery companies too. When have we ever, when is one to one delivery?
ever been an efficient idea in the history of the world? It's not. It's very expensive, very costly. For the most part. Our deliveries are one to many. Then by that I mean a truck that goes out and services multiple orders or people at the same time, or a plane that takes multiple people to a location.
It's just not something that makes sense when you step back and think about it from that.
Sid: Yeah, I think it we're in a very interesting point in time where brands are trying to evolve and try new things and some will stick and some won't. To your point and time will tell. Mm-hmm. and the consumer, I think will have a big role to play in what I think works and, and doesn't.
Let's pivot a little bit and, and just talk about the last three years, right? Yeah. It's been an interesting three years to say the least, and. There are a few things that happened right after Covid One, consumer behavior, I think changed. Expectations changed. Yep. And so retail, grocers, restaurants, they had to adapt.
So they adapted their physical spaces too. To meet the customer where they want to be met and serve the customer in new ways. It's also omnichannel interactions with the customer. So you got Instacart, Uber Eats, DoorDash, all of these different channels that maybe previously were a smaller part of your revenue now are a much.
Bigger part and you have to get it right cuz consumers don't like when only one of the ways they interact with you is great. They want every interaction with you as a brand to be great. And in the physical spaces like restaurants had to install, drive-throughs and change their kitchens. So like have separate sections for all the takeouts, right?
So there's a lot going on. Are these things like in your mind, are these things that are. After effects of a couple of years of, of change in behavior and we're gonna just level set back to what we are used to, or this is going to be a trend now, and retailers and grocers and restaurants need to be just ready to adapt as consumer demands and behavior changes.
Chris: This is the new normal. And it's like, goes back to, I said in the opening, the convenience dynamics have changed in the minds of the consumer and it's a universal truth to me that right. We, and particularly the younger Generat, Want to consume everything on their schedule and on demand to the best of their abilities.
And so that means that retailers are gonna continue to have to adapt to this. And we're really only in the first inning of that adaptation. It's gonna be really interesting to see how it plays out from here and what comes next. But yeah, I would still be investing in anything that helps answer that question of how do I make myself more convenient for my.
I'd make that
Sid: top of mind. Yeah. All businesses are adapting today. And you've been doing this for a few years now. Mm-hmm. . And as you were saying earlier, there were things you were calling out maybe a few years back that maybe everyone didn't buy into believe. Mm-hmm. . But it, a lot of it came true. But retail today is adapting and what may have been traditional.
E-commerce brands are buying physical brick and mortar spaces because they understand the importance of having that interaction with the customer and having that channel to have the customer go and meet them and gain access to all their products. So there was this whole thing in the middle, right about.
Oh yeah. Brick and mortar is dead like that. Didn't that never made any sense? No, no. Brick and mortar is never dead. It was just adapting. What are your thoughts
Chris: on that? God, I got a lot of thoughts on what you just said. I think a hundred percent brick and mortar was never dead. Brick and mortar was never going away.
You look at the most advanced digital. Commerce countries in the world, it's still a significant portion of the business. It's still the large majority of the business, so it's never going to go anywhere. And like we said, there's plenty of times where the physical store experience is the more convenient option in someone's life, and it could be the better brand option in yada yada.
This should think about the digitally native. element that you brought up to me is, I always think that's funny. Oh, we're seeing this new move of digitally native brands going into physical stores because they can, they see that they help drive awareness for their brand. That's not new, like that's been since the dawn of time.
Like anyone that's had a new brand. Yeah, sure. Now you can sell it digitally very easily when you make a new product than you could say in 1960. But if I had a new brand in 1960, my job was to decide do I wanna sell it wholesale or do I wanna stand up my own retail operation and get it in the hands of consumers?
And to do that, I might need stores like. That stuff I think is hilarious because like it's not anything new and the fact that we spend any time on it, like talking about it like that just blows my mind because it's just the same game that we've been playing since the dawn of time. And the key is just figuring out, okay, how many stores do you need?
Where should you put them? How big should they be? What should be the manifestation of the brand that people know? The difference is that the key difference is that people understand the brand digitally. Whereas before in the 1960s, it was probably more of a physical understanding of that brand is how it started.
So the origin points are different, but the exercise is still the same at the end of the
Sid: day. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. When you look at the challenges that brands are facing today, we spoke about labor shortages and and supply chain, but are there any other challenges that you think are top of mind when you speak to leaders from all sorts of brands and different spaces?
I
Chris: got the chance to interview John Ferner and rf. He's the president and CEO of Walmart, us and I think he said something that was really important, and I'm paraphrasing him here. I'm gonna try off the top of my head, but he said essentially something. loyalty in retail is a function of the consumer's options, and that's not exactly what he said.
It's something to that degree, which is like another way of saying is we as human beings are only as faith as our options, right? And so that I know is what's keeping him up at night. And I think those core issues that I talked about before are probably what's driving his focus. Because if he nails them well then he knows he's meeting the consumer expectation and exceeding.
Day in and day out. But the other thing I think that is probably top of mind for most executives is things are changing so fast. How am I communicating with my customer? How is that evolving? How do I keep pace with all the change on that? TikTok is still occupying a lot of mindshare within the executives, at least on the marketing side, in terms of the brand, in terms.
How that's evolving, how that space is evolving, how do we need to think about that continued evolution? And I'd say that's particularly so on the brand side as opposed to the retailer side as well. Because the other angle to this is the brands have a lot more tools in their toolbox, so to speak, to talk to their customers directly and to leverage the infrastructure built up around commerce differently than they have in the.
And so that's an interesting dynamic to watch play out as well. What are you
Sid: seeing in terms of consumer expectations and where do you think it's gonna go from here? I think
Chris: for the most part, I think it goes back to what I said before, like when you asked me like, should we expect these changes to, to continue to be important.
I think for the most part I would say that the consumer is going to continue to evolve and that will be a more gradual evolution. I think there's a saying too that we tend to. Underestimate the change that happens in the 10 years, but overestimate the change that happens in the short term That should happen in the short term.
I think it's a psychological phenomenon. That's how we think about things. And so while we think it may, we may want it to happen faster over time, it'll just be an evolution and then we'll look back and go, oh man, that, that's a lot of change because it was different than what we knew when we started the evolution or the journey together.
So I think, I think that's where it's gonna be. I mean, I'm trying to draw some examples here, how fast we need delivery. is an open question on every retailer, executives and brand executives mind. Like, do people really need things in 30 minutes? Are they okay in an hour to two hours? Are they okay in four hours?
Are they okay in same day? Does it vary by product category that you're talking about? No one knows the answer to those questions yet. Yeah, and it's gonna take a few years at least to figure them out. But it's not gonna be one size fits all for everyone. I, that's one thing I think we can all take to the bank.
Are there
Sid: any particular brands that you think are making some big bets that excite you?
Chris: Oh yeah. I mean, had you asked me last year, I would've said Amazon, but I think that's a different story now. I'm curious where they go next with this whole thing. But yeah, there's one recently that we talked about on our weekly podcast.
I've always admired Sam's. And Sam's Club announced that they're gonna build 30 new stores, which doesn't sound like a lot, but if you think about Sam's Club and their store base, that's a 5% increase in their store base. So that's a pretty big growth plan. And they're gonna do 'em differently. They're gonna build 'em with bigger back rooms.
They're gonna enable curbside pickup, which is an option at Sam's Club, which correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think you can do it Costco. So it's a very competitively differentiating play as well. And the reason I call them out is, Sam's Club has been innovative throughout their entire history. They've had scan and go in operation all their stores since 2016, before the pandemic.
They've had a concept store called Sam's Club, now down in Dallas, which is an only scan and go experience. You can't shop the store any other way. They have a distribution center. The future, I believe it's out in California. And so that just tells you that innovation matters, r and d matters. And if you do it the right way, you're gonna be prepared to set yourself up in the future for to capitalize on these growth opportunities.
So that's one I like to call attention to because I think they deserve a ton of credit for being as well run as they have been for the past 10 years. No,
Sid: I agree. RJ Zines, who runs a big part of their facilities and their property administration, I know him well. Yeah. And yeah, like the way they think about consumer loyalty and brand experience and thinking about everything.
From a scientific approach, but also keeping empathy in mind for the consumer. It's really amazing. Yeah, I agree. That's definitely a brand that I think is getting things right. Looking ahead, what do you see is the future of retail? What is going to work in your mind and what do you think is gonna fall flat?
And what should brands do if they were listening to this podcast, what should they do to prepare and stay?
Chris: It's probably simplest to answer that question on a macro view. Like actually just put out a, I put out an article that I wrote on Forbes, I think three years ago where I did a musical chairs of the top 20 retailers, which retailers would be left sitting at the end, so to speak.
And I went round by round all 20. And it was fun to read because you know what it told me was a couple things and I. The Mass merchants, the targets, the Walmarts of the world, they're gonna be in a good place because they're the one stop shop. They're automatically built towards that convenience side of things.
The other spot I would call out too would be the dollar stores. I think the dollar stores are very well positioned that industry continues to grow year over year because the economy is the way it is, and that off price element to or low price element to what they do is important. So that's who I would bet.
The ones I wouldn't bet on. I'm still very short on and I'm not a financial analyst, so don't take, please take this as a grain of salt. I'm actually won't call out companies for that reason, but I'm short on the department stores particularly. I think that's just a tough business to make work and, and it's hard for me to answer like the why and why a department store should exist anymore.
When you get right down to it, like, why am I going to that department store? What makes. The most convenient experience for me in my life that I can't simulate online anymore. I think it's just much more at risk of still being upended through other, uh, options. So what do brands do? I think it comes back to what you alluded to in the beginning, which is the value equation's different for everyone, and you have to decide based on your brand and most importantly, your margin structure.
how are you gonna provide that value for your consumer at the end of the day? And I wish I had one silver bullet, but I think I'd be remiss if I thought I did. And it's gonna be up to each individual's judgment to decide where they're gonna vest in what for the manifestation of their brand day in and day out.
Sid: Is there any trend that you're seeing that you're like, wow, I can't believe that's working. Or you're like, yeah, like this should not be working, but it is. Oh
Chris: wow. That's a good question. The one that's coming to mind for me right now is, there's two actually, and they're two sides of the same coin, but the, there's been a big emphasis on the retail media network, which is essentially the idea that the, the retailers of the brands themselves can stand up their own media platforms and get an a alternative revenue source.
I think that's a little bit overheated. Another thing we're starting to see, which is similar, at least you can draw an analogy to. The retailer becoming their own three pl for other people gaps doing it. American Eagles doing it, huh? And it's a question of like, how many of those do you need as well? So how many retail media networks do we really need?
And how many three pls do we really need? And don't the three pls already do what they do? So there's all these questions I have around that, which they're all sexy, they're all fun to talk about. But I don't know, we may be getting ahead of ourselves, but that's also one Syd where I could look back and go, man, I was weight rock even calling that out today on February, whatever day it is.
Interesting.
Sid: Alright, let's end with an interesting one. Putting your top retail influencer hat aside for a second. And as, and thinking as a consumer, what brand has gained your loyalty? What are you, which brand are you a fan of? Oh
Chris: man, I'm probably the wrong person to ask. That. That's where, for me, that's why brand matters.
I mean, for me, brand affinity is important. It's about what you look like and who you are. And I hate to say it, but I get my partner Anne RAs me on our podcasts all the time. I've got more Adidas. I'm not wearing anything right now. I guess I am. I got the Adidas vest on here today, but I've got more Adidas stuff than I know what to do with, man.
The important point though is like at the end of the day, like are they doing anything great that I would call out from an omnichannel retailing per. Not particularly. They're just keeping up and keeping pace and speaking to me the right way at the right time, and kudos to them for doing that. But it shows you that there are a lot of elements that come into play here.
Besides just technology and innovation. That's great.
Sid: Chris, any word of advice to our audience who is listening and might be in a very specific function that that relates to the physical brick and mortar space? What would you say to them? What should they walk away with as it relates to what impact they can make to the brands that they work for?
Chris: I think particularly with the in, in, if you're talking about the physical space as you are, I think you know the important question. How is what you're doing? Answering the question of why is my customer coming to this physical store? How am I making that experience enticing and better for them so that when they're making that choice, yes, between coming or spending time with me or spending time anywhere in the world, because that's really what you're competing on.
You're competing on time. You're not competing against other retailers. You're competing on them taking their time to go to your. That's the frame of mind I would pull myself in as I'm trying to make
Sid: decisions. That's great. I love that. That's such an important point. Well, with that, Chris, I really appreciate your time.
I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Where can our audience find you? I'm
Chris: very available on LinkedIn. If you wanna message me directly, you can. The other great place you can follow omni talk retail on LinkedIn, and you can also follow our blog, which is www.omnitalk.blog. That's where you can see all the content we're putting out in the media, and we're pretty voracious in terms of the amount of content we put out on a weekly basis.
Sid: That's awesome. Thanks again, Chris. Well, that was Chris Walton, co CEO of Omni Talk. A key takeaway for me from that conversation is there's a lot of change in innovation taking place right now, but the physical brick and mortar space has always and will continue to have a big impact on your brand and the sentiment your customer feels when they walk in.
Irrespective of whether the brand's core value proposition is convenience, price, value, or experience. What is clear is that you need to make the customer want to come back and walk in through your door. We are all competing for consumer loyalty and their time. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. And with that, I'm your host, Sid Shetty, and I'll see you on the next episode of Elevating Brick and Mortar
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