Omni Talk Retail

Amazon has significantly expanded its Prime Video shopping features, growing its "Shop the Show" tool from 1,300 titles to more than 8,000 while adding new visual search capabilities.

Chris Walton and Josh Hahn discuss whether shoppable TV is finally reaching scale or if it risks ruining the core entertainment experience.

▶️ Watch the full Fast Five episode here: https://youtu.be/089y7s8PKCE

Macy’s has posted its fifth consecutive quarter of comparable-sales growth, beating Wall Street estimates and raising its full-year guidance as CEO Tony Spring's turnaround strategy takes hold.

Chris Walton and Josh Hahn discuss whether it's finally time to plant the victory flag at Macy's, or if there is still too much heavy lifting left to do on the core brand.

▶️ Watch the full Fast Five episode here: https://youtu.be/089y7s8PKCE

Walmart has added Papa Johns to Walmart Express Delivery, making it the first national restaurant brand fulfilled entirely from locations outside of Walmart stores.

Chris Walton and guest host Josh Hahn discuss whether Walmart’s latest move is a clever way to bring customers into the app more often, or if they are solving a need that consumers never actually asked for.

▶️ Watch the full Fast Five episode here: https://youtu.be/089y7s8PKCE

Welcome to the very first episode of Making Space Real Time, a new show from Chris Niesen, presented by the Association of Retail Consumer Professionals (ARC) in partnership with the Omni Talk Retail Podcast Network. The week Chris Niesen is joined by Omni Talk CEO Chris Walton as his guest host to break down what's actually happening on the retail floor.

In this episode:

🎨 Michaels' next-gen store format — What the knit-and-sew shop, rebuilt party shop, and Pinterest trend bar in the new Rogers, Arkansas store tell us about Michaels' pivot toward "creativity and celebration," and whether the format can scale past three test stores

📉 TJX's rare miss — Why Marmaxx (TJ Maxx and Marshalls) comped just 1% against a 6% comp the quarter before, and whether it's a competitive pricing issue, a merchandising and space-planning issue, or both, with a direct comparison to sister brand HomeGoods

💄 Target's Beauty Studio launch — A first-hand, opening-day walkthrough of Target's new owned-and-operated beauty shop rolling out to 600+ stores, replacing the Ulta Beauty partnership, including candid notes on staffing, training, in-store marketing clutter, and whether the experience lives up to a "prestige" positioning

🎤 Plus: a Checkout segment covering lessons from the two Chris's shared years at Gap, can't-miss retailers to visit (Patina Stores, Dick's House of Sport, Sam's Club), and the most overlooked category in retail today

📍 New episodes of Making Space -- Real Time every other week.

📩 Subscribe to Chris Niesen on Substack: chrisniesen.substack.com

Live from the Vusion podcast studio at NRF Retail's Big Show Europe in Paris, Ben Miller sits down with Shailesh Jain, Chief Customer & Analytics Officer at Landmark Group, to cut through the AI hype and explore where the technology is actually creating value in retail.

Shailesh explains why AI can amplify both good and bad business decisions, why retailers should start with the problem rather than the technology, and how Landmark Group is scaling AI across thousands of stores, multiple brands and geographies. He also breaks down how AI is enabling the company to personalize content across 2,000 micro-segments, while keeping guardrails in place to make sure personalization helps customers without crossing the line into feeling like surveillance.

In this episode:

• Where AI is creating real value in retail, and where the hype is misplaced

• Why retailers should start with business decisions, not AI projects

• How Landmark Group is scaling AI across brands and geographies

• Using AI to personalize content across 2,000 customer micro-segments

• How AI is changing CRM, customer communication and personalization

• Why the best customer decision can sometimes be not to communicate

• Where retailers should draw the line between personalization and surveillance

• The importance of human oversight in critical customer and business decisions

• What retail CEOs should focus on when approaching AI

🎧 Subscribe to Omni Talk Retail for more conversations with the leaders shaping retail.

The Fall retail conference season is officially underway, with NRF Paris having just wrapped and Groceryshop, Shoptalk Fall, NACS, and many others just weeks away. Omni Talk figured what better way to get ready for the upcoming season than to put together our primer of the must-see tech that has caught our attention this year.

Whether attending a conference over the next few months or if you just have FOMO, we have assembled a review of the cutting edge solutions providers thinking about how to make retail work better.

Chris Walton (OmniTalk, President & CEO) and special guest host and conference content producer extraordinaire Ben Miller (GrocerTalk, Founder & Editor-in-Chief) break down key insights alongside executives from every solutions provider highlighted.

Featured expert speakers and companies include:

• Georgina Nelson – TruRating, Founder & CEO
• Daniel Slowe – Quorso, Founder & Chief Product Officer
• Daniel Duty – Conlego, CEO & Founder of Portager
• Alex Kopplin – Conlego, Principal and Architect of Portager
• Oliver Leigh – Portal, CEO & Co-Founder
• Justin Samakow – Mirakl, Head of Platform Strategy

Be sure to check out the rest of our podcasts this past week and the next few to catch exclusive content from some of the biggest retail conferences!

We can’t think of a better way to get a bird's eye view into the tech shaping the retail of tomorrow, today!

P.S. To explore more conversations from the Omni Talk Ask an Expert Series, head here.

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Sponsored Content

Live from the Vusion podcast studio at NRF Retail’s Big Show Europe in Paris, Ben Miller is joined by Bastian Sehnert, Head of Data & AI Initiative Office at MediaMarktSaturn, to explore how Europe’s largest electronics retailers are moving AI from experimentation into real operational use.

Bastian breaks down how MediaMarktSaturn is using AI across customer-facing applications, product data and internal processes, while explaining what it takes to scale AI across 11 countries through strong governance, clear ownership and integration with existing workflows. He also looks ahead at agentic commerce and AI orchestration and what they could mean for retail.

In this episode:

• How MediaMarktSaturn is approaching AI across customer and internal operations

• Where AI can create value across customer care, recommendations and advertising

• Using AI to improve and scale product data quality

• Why AI should take on repetitive tasks while humans retain accountability

• How AI governance can help move use cases from pilot to scale

• Why every AI use case needs a clear business owner

• The importance of adoption when scaling AI across an organization

• Integrating AI into existing workflows, backend systems and legacy technology

• How MediaMarktSaturn is scaling AI across 11 countries

• Balancing shared technology with local customer and cultural needs

• Why every AI pilot needs a clear plan to scale

• What agentic commerce and AI orchestration could mean for retail

🎧 Subscribe to Omni Talk Retail for more conversations with the leaders shaping retail.

Grocers are investing heavily in electronic shelf labels, but what happens when the hardware is in place and the software can't keep up with the complexity of grocery pricing? In this edition of 5 Insightful Minutes, Kim Schneider, VP of Sales for Vestcom North America Retail at Avery Dennison, joins Ben Miller and Chris Walton to explain why the key to maximizing shelf-edge technology investments starts with the software behind the labels.

Kim breaks down why Vestcom's expertise goes far beyond paper shelf tags, and how its storeLink software acts as a central brain for managing the complex data, pricing rules, promotions, and operational demands of the grocery shelf edge. She explains why going digital doesn't eliminate the challenges of retail execution, especially when grocers are managing a combination of paper and electronic shelf labels, and how intelligent software can help retailers protect their ROI, avoid vendor lock-in, and maintain accurate pricing across every store.

Key Topics Covered:

• Why electronic shelf labels are only as effective as the software behind them

• How Vestcom's 40 years of shelf-edge expertise informs its technology solutions

• Why grocery pricing data is so complex

• How storeLink manages pricing, promotions, and shelf-edge data

• The operational challenges of balancing paper and digital shelf labels

• Why going digital doesn't automatically eliminate pricing and execution issues

• How software can act as a single source of truth across paper and digital labels

• Why hardware-agnostic software helps retailers avoid vendor lock-in

• How retailers can protect the ROI of their ESL investments

• The hidden operational costs of pricing errors and sync failures

• How storeLink proactively identifies data issues, layout errors, and offline tags

• Why software should never be an afterthought in an ESL rollout

• What grocery CEOs and CIOs should consider before investing in digital shelf labels

Read Kim Schneider's article: Could an ESL Blindspot Sabotage Your ROI?

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Sponsored Content

Welcome to Omni Talk's Retail Daily Minute, sponsored by R&S Logistics, ZenlineAI, and Mirakl.

In today's Retail Daily Minute, Omni Talk's Chris Walton discusses:

• Carter's unveils a rebrand and new logo aimed at Gen Z parents, even as tariff refunds help prop up its bottom line.
• Costco expands its Uber Eats delivery partnership to 47 states and nearly 600 warehouses nationwide.
• JCPenney trades its 180,000-square-foot Ford City Mall store for a 39,000-square-foot location nearby as the mall itself crumbles.

The Retail Daily Minute has been rocketing up the Feedspot charts, so stay informed with Omni Talk's Retail Daily Minute, your source for the latest and most important retail insights.

In this week’s Omni Talk Retail Fast Five, sponsored by the A&M Consumer and Retail Group, Mirakl, Ocampo Capital, Quorso, Veloq, and R&S Logistics, Chris Walton is joined by J Recruiting’s Josh Hahn for another round of Fast Five fun, recorded from Chris’s very tiny Paris hotel room across the street from NRF Europe. This week’s episode can best be summed up as . . . better ingredients, better pizza, better delivery via Walmart.

Chris and Josh dig into five of the biggest stories in retail this week, including:

• Walmart adding Papa Johns to Walmart Express Delivery and whether Walmart is quietly building a challenger to DoorDash and Uber Eats. (Source)

• Macy’s posting its fifth straight quarter of comparable-sales growth and raising guidance as CEO Tony Spring’s turnaround begins to take hold. (Source)

• Amazon expanding “Shop the Show” from 1,300 titles to more than 8,000 and whether shoppable TV is finally reaching scale. (Source)

• SKIMS partnering with DoorDash for on-demand delivery and whether instant delivery fits a brand built around exclusivity and hype. (Source)

• Kroger cutting its full-year sales outlook even as ecommerce and retail media continue to grow, raising questions about the future of traditional grocery. (Source)

The episode wraps with a lightning round covering Josh’s 20 years between Sports Authority and Meijer, the daily chore Chris wishes AI would handle for him, which QSR Josh would like to see added to Walmart’s restaurant tab, and Chris’s two non-negotiable rules for airport etiquette.

Plus, this month’s OmniStar is Meredith Klausner, SVP of Retail & Services at Best Buy, recognized for the impact she continues to make across the retail industry.

P.S. Be sure to check out all our other podcasts from the past week here, too: https://omnitalk.blog/category/podcast/

P.P.S. Also be sure to check out our podcast rankings on Feedspot.

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