Craig Patterson is the Editor-in-Chief of the leading Canadian retail industry news magazine, Retail Insider. He joins the show to discuss how retail has changed in the last few years, why online shopping still has value in a post-covid world, and his take on the future of retail.

Marshall Kay is the founder of RFID Sherpas and a retail entrepreneurial consultant. In this episode, we dive into the technology of RFID technology, and how it can help retail brands in their stores. RFID creates smart labels that will help stores collect and manage more data about the movement of their inventories. This technology is inexpensive to implement and it will fundamentally improve the running of your store.

Ron Thurston is the host of the Retail in America Podcast. He spent many years working on the front lines of retail, and then he wrote his book, Retail Pride, to celebrate his career journey. On his book tour, he also meets front line retail workers around the country and documents his adventures on his podcast. On the show today, we talk about what it’s like to work on the front lines of retail in 2022. Ron shares everything retail businesses need to know about supporting the workers on the front lines.

April Sabral is the founder and CEO of retailu, an online, on demand leadership development platform for retail professionals. She is also the author of The Positive Effect, where she details her journey working in retail. In the episode today, we talk about the biggest lessons April has to share about leadership in the retail industry, including her ACT model that she uses to teach retail professionals how to build strong teams.

Mina Fader is the Managing Director of Wharton’s Baker Retailing Center at the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode, Mena discusses the present and future state of retail. She breaks down the fate of the brick and mortar space in the digital, post-COVID world, and you might be surprised to hear her take on where retail is heading in the future.

Hitha is the Chief Research Officer at H Squared Research LLC, a consumer spending columnist at US News and World Report, and the author of the book “Black Market Billions: How Organized Retail Crimes Fund Terrorists.” She is a self-proclaimed futurist related to all things retail, and in this episode, she discusses some of the trends that we should be looking for in the retail space.

What is the NRF (National Retail Federation) and what do they do? Today’s guest, Katherine Cullen, is the senior director of industry and consumer insights for the National Retail Federation’s research team. That means that she leads NRF’s research on consumer spending and emerging retail trends. What does that information tell us about retail today?

Listen to today’s interview to learn more about it. You’ll hear what Katherine has to say about her own journey to the NRF, why in-location experiences remain so important, and what she has to share about Generation Z’s shopping and buying behaviors.

TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY’S EPISODE:

- Katherine’s background

- What led Katherine to NRF

- What’s changed over the last few years in retail

- Why in-location experiences matter

- Generation Z buying behavior

- Advice for staying current for Generation Z while serving older consumers as well

- How to engage with older consumers on digital channels

- What Black Friday will look like post-COVID

- How online channels serve in-store performance

- Retail technology adoption that’s grown recently

- New technologies that will impact shopping

Over recent years, there have been many changes in what people expect from retailers. People want to shop locally, but they also want the convenience afforded to them by big retailers. SpotOn helps smaller retailers achieve that. Today, you’ll hear from Doron Friedman, co-founder of SpotOn.

Listen to the episode to hear more about Doron and SpotOn, and how SpotOn helps businesses. Learn how SpotOn’s clients use the service, how it helps them cope with changing trends and challenges, and why small businesses should be thinking about using alternative types of payment.

TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY’S EPISODE:

- How Doron got to where he is

- What types of businesses SpotOn brings on board

- How SpotOn’s clients use SpotOn

- Changes and trends that Doron has seen in customer behavior

- How SpotOn helps brands with changes and challenges

- Core technology needs that businesses have

- What merchants get wrong about investing in tech

- Why small businesses would want to introduce alternative payments

- How smaller businesses can compete with bigger e-tailers

- The big lessons that Doron has learned

Has the definition or expectation of convenience changed over time? The people who might best know the answer to this are people in the convenience store business – people like today’s guest.

Pervez Pir is the President of Retail at Loop Neighborhood Marketplace, and he has an important perspective on the value of convenience and convenience stores in the lives of the people who use those stores. Listen to the episode to hear what Pervez has to say about Loop’s retail strategies, what trends have changed in recent years, and what’s most important to creating the Loop experience.

TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY’S EPISODE:

- What Pervez does now and how he got there

- How Loop came about and how Perez got introduced to it

- What Loop caters to

- Why people love coming back to Loop

- The strategy behind Loop’s locations

- How the definition of convenience has evolved

- Trends that have changed since the COVID days

- What’s most important to the Loop experience

- Why Loop’s customers visit so often

- The lessons Pervez has taken from being in the convenience store business for so long

- What’s going to change in convenience

- Advice on how to grow in the convenience store business

When you’re a business operator, how can you make sure you’re on track, gather the information you need, and keep up with what your team needs and what they’re doing? The answer is good operations management. And that’s what today’s guest’s business does – operations management and analytics.

Tommy Yionoulis is the founder of OpsAnalitica. Previously he worked in restaurants and also did a stint as a stand-up comedian. Listen to today’s episode to hear what Tommy has to say about why he founded OpsAnalitica, what benefits businesses see from Tommy’s platform, and how his services work for brick and mortar businesses.

TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY’S EPISODE:

- What Tommy is all about

- What made Tommy start OpsAnalitica

- Ops Analytica’s typical customers

- The benefits of using Tommy’s platform

- Changes that Tommy’s seen in the past few years

- The data that helps operators manage their businesses

- Challenges that Tommy sees operators facing

- Tommy’s view of technology in the workplace

- Operations management in brick and mortar industries

- Advice Tommy would give to help operators streamline operations