Dear Corporate... Love Stores | Engaging Retail Employees

Can you train people to care?

You walk into a store, no one says hello, and three associates are on their phones.

A common conclusion is that they need more training, and it’s one of the most common complaints about retail right now, especially from former executives describing their store visits on LinkedIn.

In this episode, Matt and Bekki dig into what has to be in place before good service can happen at all, and why training can build on that foundation but never replace it.

What we get into:

• Why “good service” isn’t one thing, and can’t be scripted for customers who aren’t a monolith

• How retail lost both the carrot and the stick, and what happens when the next job is a few doors down
• What’s going on in an associate’s head mid-shift, and why so many store managers remember the first time they cried in a store bathroom
• Why training without engagement is like hiring a magazine decorator for a house with no foundation
• The trickle-down problem: companies asking store leaders to give their teams what no one is giving them
• The customer’s role, from how anonymity at big brands changes behaviour to whether stores need a customer code of conduct
• Where the line is with abusive customers, and why de-escalation training puts it all on the $15-an-hour employee
• The empathy paradox: hiring people for empathy, then expecting them not to get hurt
• Why one snapshot of a store tells you as little as a survey score on its own, a callback to last episode

A line that stuck:
“No one cares about these employees, and in turn, they are not caring about me.”

Before you assume it’s training, ask:
Do they know what to do? Can they? Do they want to? Can they in these conditions?

And Matt’s test: if a few people are giving poor service, look at training and coaching. If it’s everyone, it’s not a training problem. It’s an engagement problem.

What is an employee actually thinking about when they give an engagement survey question a 2, a 3, or a 5?

That’s what we wanted to unpack in this episode of Dear Corporate… Love Stores.

Bekki takes Matt through a handful of very common employee engagement survey questions and asks him to go beyond the score: What experiences are you recalling? How are you interpreting the question? Who do you think it’s really asking about? And what are you expecting corporate to do with your answer?

Very quickly, it becomes clear how much can be hiding inside a single number.

“I have the tools and resources I need to do my job well” could mean training to one employee, decision-making authority to another, enough payroll to someone else, or having the inventory needed to actually deliver results.

“I believe I can have a career here” might really contain two different questions: Could I have a career here? and Do I actually want one?

And sometimes employees aren’t just answering based on their current experience. They’re thinking one move ahead: If I score this low, what are they going to do about it?

In this episode, we unpack:

• What employees may actually be thinking about when they answer common engagement survey questions

• Why broad questions can mean completely different things at different levels of the organization

• The difference between having more “tools” and actually removing friction

• Why career opportunity and desire to stay are not the same thing

• How trust, anonymity and perceptions of who will see the results can affect responses

• Why employees may adjust their answers based on what they think corporate will do next

• How corporate teams can unintentionally interpret survey results through the lens of solutions they already wanted to pursue

• Why looking at individual scores in isolation can lead you in the wrong direction

• And why qualitative follow-up is critical if you actually want to understand what the data is telling you

If you want to act on the data well, get clearer about what you’re asking, look for patterns across multiple questions, and then go back to employees and ask what was actually running through their heads when they answered.

Because before you build another program, toolkit, training module or communication campaign, it’s worth making sure you understand what the score actually meant.

Retail has problems. Staffing, workload, culture, expectations — organizations absolutely have a responsibility to make things better.

But what happens when you spend years waiting for the job to change before you let yourself have a life?

In this episode, Bekki and Matt are joined by Samantha Foster, founder of Aligned Systems Co. and a retail leader with 25 years of frontline experience, to talk about the part of the retail experience employees may actually have more power over than they think.

Sam shares how she stopped waiting for better circumstances and started changing the things she could control — from her finances and health to the boundaries she set around work.

Together, they unpack the invisible badge of honour around overwork in retail, why leaders often follow expectations nobody actually gave them, and how self-imposed hustle can turn into exhaustion and resentment.

They also explore a bigger question: what might change in retail if more store leaders stopped making impossible expectations possible?

In this episode:

• Why retail leaders can’t wait for someone else to give them permission to have a life

• The difference between organizational problems and the pressure we put on ourselves

• How retail’s “grind” culture gets passed from leader to leader

• Why boundaries can feel dangerous even when nobody is actually stopping you from setting them

• How overworking can create resentment toward the business

• Why taking care of yourself can make you a better leader for your team

• The connection between boundaries, autonomy and sustainable retail careers

• Why organizations should measure how employees actually feel — not just the wellbeing programs they offer

• What could happen if enough store leaders collectively stopped absorbing unrealistic expectations

About Sam Foster

Samantha Foster is the founder of Aligned Systems Co., where she helps retail leaders build the personal systems, boundaries and skills that allow them to succeed at work without losing the rest of their lives in the process.

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn or learn more at alignedsystems.co.

Connect

Sam Foster: LinkedIn | alignedsystems.co

Bekki Cait: LinkedIn

More than a year ago, we started this podcast with one big question: why is the disconnect between corporate and store teams so hard to fix?

So this week, we’re going back to the beginning.

In our very first episode, Matt and I unpacked the day-to-day realities behind the corporate–store divide: initiatives landing in stores as though there’s unlimited time to absorb them, too many competing priorities and communication channels, metrics that can work against the mission, rigid standards that undermine good judgment, and the lack of trust that keeps corporate leaders from seeing what’s actually happening in stores.

Listening back now is interesting because so much of what we’ve explored over the past year was already sitting inside this conversation.

The engagement survey. Corporate visits. Store manager overload. Communication. Empowerment. Psychological safety. The pressure to make stores look fine instead of making it safe to say when they aren’t.

We’ve spent a year pulling those threads apart, challenging some of our own thinking, and getting much more specific about what it actually takes to close the gap.

But the central idea still holds:

Corporate and stores usually want the same thing — successful stores and happy customers. The systems between them are what keep getting in the way.

Whether you’ve been listening since the beginning or found us somewhere along the way, this felt like a good moment to revisit where the conversation started — and hear it again with everything we know now.

This week, Bekki asks Matt to walk through an executive store visit from start to finish: the first rumours that someone is coming, the weeks of preparation, what “visit ready” actually means, what happens when executives walk through the door, and the strange phone-tree that follows them from store to store.

Matt explains why a well-run store and a visit-ready store aren't necessarily the same thing, how store leaders learn to manage the visit itself, and why he uses that rare face time to teach executives what they don't know about his store, his market and what the business actually needs.

They also get into the bigger question underneath all of it: if these conversations can be genuinely useful, why does the store have to put on such a performance just to be heard?

What happens when someone without a traditional retail background starts questioning the way the industry works?

In this episode, Matt turns the questions on Bekki after a retail veteran warns that she should “be careful” about challenging industry professionals.

They talk about who gets credibility in retail, why outside perspectives can be uncomfortable, Bekki’s path from employer branding into retail employee experience, and why curiosity—not walking in with all the answers—is central to her work.

They also get into the risks of challenging the status quo, why companies sometimes design around leadership instead of employees, and whether retail needs more voices willing to ask questions that challenge the status quo...00:00 Netflix Doc Cold Open

00:20 DM Criticism and Credentials

02:30 Invisible Army and Gatekeeping

05:51 What She Actually Does09:06 Born to Challenge Status Quo

11:10 Why She Cares So Much

13:58 Employer Branding to Engagement

19:34 Behind the Curtain Lessons

22:40 Caring Beyond Your Lane

25:40 The Moment It Clicked

28:40 Curiosity That Changed Everything

30:07 Designing for Egos

31:35 Curiosity as a Skill

34:29 Why Keep Speaking Up

37:51 Care as the Real Motive

42:33 Skin in the Game

45:06 Truth Telling Consultants

48:03 Why Cato Exists

51:29 Cato Name Origin

54:06 New Voices in Retail

57:40 Closing Reflections

We talk to Lakeisha "Keisha" Parker, a cannabis advocate and longtime retail leader whose writing frames cannabis as a teacher and the industry as a tug-of-war between profit and purpose.

We discuss how cannabis retail overlaps with traditional retail but is complicated by regulation and stigma.

Keisha describes burnout, frequent acquisitions, the cost and delays of cannabis hiring/badging, and the widening corporate-store gap in MSOs, urging executives to visit stores, listen beyond KPIs, invest in training, and preserve the “soul” before cannabis retail becomes as impersonal as the DMV.00:00 Journey Into the Green

00:44 Meet Keisha Parker

01:31 Retail Meets Regulation

02:55 From Medical to Adult Use

04:09 Personal Retail Stories

06:21 RMV vs Human Experience

09:15 Stigma and Store Differentiation

12:59 Retail Mechanics and Flow

17:18 Training Empathy Soft Skills

22:14 Burnout and Acquisitions

24:41 Corporate Hiring and Investment

31:16 Executive Disconnect Speed Round

42:14 Be Approachable in Stores

44:39 Wrap Up and Contact Info

"No Man’s Land": The Regional Manager as Retail’s TranslatorWe dig into the “middle layer” between corporate and stores: regional/district/area managers, with guest David Miller joining from Scotland.

David describes the role as a balancing act in “no man’s land,” translating corporate strategy into shop-floor reality while pushing real store constraints back up to senior leaders.

The group debates why corporate communication gets lost, why visibility and unannounced store visits matter, and how siloed departments and overused emails harm execution, transparency (especially P&L data), and turnover.00:00 Why Regionals Matter

02:09 No Mans Land Role

07:09 Translator And Visibility

09:00 Executives Not Listening

10:54 Candy Store Decisions

13:06 Delivery Apps Case Study

17:27 Ego And Experience Gap

23:51 Breaking Silos Together

26:03 Call Dont Email

29:50 Transparency And PnL Context

33:23 Why Share Store Economics

35:54 Why Context Matters

37:21 P&L Sharing Limits

38:56 Sensitive Data Risks

40:58 Ownership Through Transparency

42:02 Autonomy And Expectations

46:27 Turnover And Trust

47:13 KPI Overload Problem

51:41 Leadership On The Floor

54:30 Unannounced Store Visits

59:36 When Execs No Show

01:05:17 Final Takeaways And Thanks

Team Opener vs. Team CloserWe dig into the classic opener-vs-closer rivalry in retail and why it persists even beyond payroll cuts.

Using examples from clothing stores and Starbucks, we talk about how tiny missed tasks snowball into resentment, how a negotiated “non-negotiables” document and better communication reduced complaints, and why having leaders actually work closing shifts builds credibility and reveals how under-resourced closers are.

Reach out to Bekki.

Reach out to Matt.

00:00 Intro

00:27 Opener vs Closer Identity

02:15 Different Jobs Same Store

05:51 The Midday Battleground

07:20 Setting Standards in Writing

10:28 Tiny Tasks Big Resentment

14:45 Closing Is Underrated

21:10 Shift Assignments and Skills

26:16 Closers and Leadership Gaps

33:33 Communication Systems and Praise

38:04 Why Execs Never Visit Nights

46:23 Middle Day Standards and Wrap Up

We scrap our planned topic and record an impromptu conversation about why high-performing retail leaders get restless and leave even when things are “fine.”

Bekki and Matt discuss how boredom is often really unfulfillment, powerlessness, and “busy work,” and how store managers can’t safely critique systems without being seen as uncommitted or immature.

Key signs of impending departure include energy shifts, compliance, and even over-performance.

They argue honesty plus visible incremental change can retain people, and that many leaders feel their only real agency is leaving.00:00 Impromptu Episode Setup

01:27 Restlessness Without Cause

05:48 Busywork and Loyalty Myth

11:29 Why DMs Feel Unsafe

18:55 Company as Relationship

26:24 Career Paths and Promises

31:49 Retention and Investment Loop

35:28 Resume Edit Point

46:48 Honesty Over Performance

50:49 Seen Versus Changed

54:13 Closing Thoughts