Retail in America

A résumé tells you where someone has been. It never tells you how they'll greet a stranger at the door.

Meghan Houle ran the global flagship for Louis Vuitton in Boston. She was the most secret-shopped manager in the building, in every category, because she was the only manager always on the floor. She then spent her career recruiting for luxury, beauty and fashion brands. Today she's the founder and CEO of CONCÉ, building the intelligence behind how brands hire. We met more than ten years ago, and I was a guest on her show, Pivot with Purpose. Now she's on mine.

In a 2025 survey of luxury houses, 93% said they struggle to fill manager and store director roles. Meghan doesn't think the talent is missing. She thinks we keep hiring people who look like our last hire. We rule people out over a brand name or a job title before anyone has asked a real question.

Then the part both sides need to hear. Brands are winging interviews as much as candidates are. And candidates who can't tell their own story leave it to someone else to tell it for them. As Meghan puts it, "you're at the mercy of the interpreter on the other side."

In this episode:

• Why the only manager on the floor got secret-shopped in every category
• Talent shortage, or hiring people who look like your last hire?
• Why "store director" means something different at every company
• Talent intelligence that disappears the moment a search closes
• The CEO who shows up 15 minutes late, and what that tells a candidate about your brand
• Why every agency search starts from zero
• The one thing every hiring leader should set before a role opens
• Channel your Elle Woods: an opening and closing statement for every interview

Find Meghan: hirewithconce.com

Meghan Houle on LinkedIn

Find Ron: ronthurston.com

Survey referenced: Comité Colbert x MAD, "Retail Talents in Luxury," 2025.

Disclosure: Ron is an advisor to CONCÉ.

Retail has spent thirty years perfecting what a store looks like and what it smells like. Nobody owns what it sounds like.

Bill Schiffmiller led accessibility at Apple before founding LSHGen — Lifelong Sound Health for Every Generation. Michael Piskosz is an audiologist whose work runs past hearing loss into sensory overload, auditory fatigue, and what sound does to human performance. The three of us co-hosted an event in New York this summer called Noise in Retail, and the conversation hasn't stopped since.

Most of the noise we absorb all day isn't noise we made or asked for — which is Bill's point about secondhand smoke. Michael walks an associate's day hour by hour, from the alarm to the fourth rotation of the same playlist to the headache at 8:30 that nobody can explain. Then the harder question: retail has always believed louder means energy and energy means sales. Can anyone actually correlate it?

The idea worth the whole episode is presenteeism — people on the floor, taking orders, talking to customers, and not working anywhere near 100%. Retail measures absenteeism because it's easy to count. Presenteeism is what happens first.

In this episode:

• Why 70 decibels of siren and 70 decibels of white noise aren't the same thing
• Who owns sound in a store, and why the answer is currently nobody
• Why Bill turned down an Apple store opening over its acoustics
• An eight-hour shift, hour by hour
• The business case: not what it costs, what it saves
• "Smoking or non-smoking," applied to noise
• What a store manager can do tomorrow without spending anything
• Presenteeism: what happens before someone stops showing up

Find Bill and Michael:

lshgen.com

Bill Schiffmiller on LinkedIn

Michael Piskosz on LinkedIn

Find Ron: ronthurston.com

If AI decides who gets found, what happens to the independent store with the best people in town?

New research Lightspeed commissioned from Vaer AI found that AI recommends big retailers over local businesses 9 out of 10 times. More than half of shoppers have already used AI to help decide what to buy. For a lot of people, the first store they visit is now a chat window, and it shows the big names first.

Dax Dasilva founded Lightspeed in Montreal in 2005 to help independent businesses compete with bigger ones. Today it powers retail and hospitality businesses in more than 100 countries. He also founded Age of Union, a nonprofit alliance protecting threatened ecosystems around the world, and wrote Age of Union and Echoes from Eden.

Dax explains why AI shopping assistants lean toward national chains, and why the gap gets wider the more specific a shopper's search gets. His advice for shoppers is simple: add "independent," "local" or "locally owned" to the prompt. "Remember that your prompt matters."

For store owners, he's just as practical. Twenty years ago, a great location, great products and great people were enough. Today an owner has to be an expert in social media, merchandising, loyalty, omnichannel and now AI search, often after getting into the business "because you love bikes." His advice: pick one channel where you can show your expertise, whether that's content, reviews, a blog or an online showroom, and own it. Then let AI agents take on the back-office work, "like co-managers for you in your business," so owners can get back to curation, customers and community.

Looking ahead to NRF's Big Show, Dax wants the industry talking about discoverability. "Small business is the engine of the economy. They can't be cut out by AI and the model makers."

The one thing you can do: Next time you ask AI where to shop, ask "Where can I buy this from an independent business near me?" Prompt local.

In this episode:

• What Lightspeed does, and why Dax built it for independent retailers
• From the Apple Store to the age of AI: 20 years of retail change
• Why agentic AI matters most for small retailers
• The research: AI picks national chains 9 out of 10 times
• Why the gap widens the closer a shopper gets to buying
• Content, reviews and social: what stores can control
• From SEO to AEO: getting found by AI instead of search engines
• One thing a small retailer can do this week
• Five years out: third spaces and the store as a gathering place
• Age of Union, Echoes from Eden and the ROI on nature
• The conversation the industry should be having at NRF

Prompt Local research: https://www.lightspeedhq.com/ai-retail-guide-teaser/

Find Dax: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daxdasilva/

lightspeedhq.com

Age of Union: https://ageofunion.com/

Find Ron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rthurston/

Disclosure: This episode is part of a paid partnership with Lightspeed.

Every January, hundreds of solution providers walk into the Javits Center to sell to retailers. Most don't understand how a retailer actually buys. Most retailers don't understand how a vendor has to sell.

Vicki Cantrell has sat in almost every seat in this industry. She was CIO at Gucci Group and Giorgio Armani, the person tech vendors had to sell to. She was COO at Tory Burch through 300% global growth, then at Shop.org and the NRF, where the Big Show grew 50% on her watch. Then she crossed the table to Aptos, selling to retailers. Ron and Vicki met in 2010 at Tory Burch. He was a district manager and she was an executive, and they've stayed friends ever since.

Vicki's diagnosis is that the old models are broken. Technology moves faster than ever, and decision-making hasn't kept up. RFPs are now written by AI on both sides, so every vendor looks like they do everything. In her words, the RFP has always been "a CYA document."

Her biggest takeaway from a recent session with retailers and vendors is blunt: take the word AI out of everything. Everything has AI now. A retailer can read a vendor's whole homepage and still not know what the vendor does. Talk about the business problem you solve, not the technology behind it. The word "needs to go away way faster than the word omnichannel did."

There is good news too. Both sides now share the same challenge, because neither knows how to navigate what's coming. That is pulling retailers and vendors into the same room and getting them to help each other. "When you put two people in a room who share the same challenges, they immediately feel safe, seen, heard."

The episode closes on the VIP Awards. Vicki explains why January 2026 felt different, and why everyone who walks in for the first time calls the night a reunion. She also covers what's new for 2027: expanded categories that include the store, and nominations built around real partnerships and the results they produced.

Nominations close Friday, October 16. The VIP Awards gala is Friday, January 8, 2027, at Gotham Hall in New York City, the Friday before NRF's Big Show.

In this episode:

• What vendors never understand about a retail executive's day, and what retailers miss about vendors
• Why buying for the store means winning over 80% of the workforce
• "Who should I talk to?" Why the title matters less than who can help you navigate
• Why today's buying models, from RFPs to redlines, no longer work
• How retailers can sort through 500 vendors
• Take the word AI out of everything
• How AI is making the industry more human
• Fear, acceptance and AI at every level of the workforce
• Inside the VIP Awards: the reunion, the long game, and what's new for 2027
• How to submit a last-minute nomination

Nominate: https://vendorsinpartnership.com/pages/nomination-hub

Find Vicki: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vickicantrell/

Find Ron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rthurston/

Disclosure: Ron is a nominee in the 2027 VIP Awards.

Blake Devillier thought he'd work at the Gap for six weeks. He needed a summer job. He stayed twenty-eight years.

What changed everything was one sentence from an acting district manager named Julia: if you were interested in building a career in leadership, I think that could happen. That conversation put Blake on a path through Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy — finishing as Territory Vice President for the East and Canada — then out of fashion entirely, to Senior Vice President of Field Operations at Taco Bell, and then President of Carl's Jr. USA.

Ron opens by asking Blake a number he can't give: how many people have worked for you? Blake's answer — hundreds of thousands — sets up the real subject of this episode. Retail is the largest private sector employer in the country. It's where a huge number of Americans learn how to work. And the people running field teams quietly set the ceiling on all of it.

Blake has spent the last seven months building a keynote around a single claim: connection is a performance multiplier. Not a value on a break room poster — something measurable, made of two nameable parts, and the reason two teams with the same product and the same payroll get completely different results.

Then, unprompted, Blake offers the thing he most wants retailers to hear — that pride is born in the pursuit of details that seem unattainable.

In this episode:

• What's the same about a frontline whether you're selling denim or tacos
• Why quick service creates experts faster than retail does — and what retail should steal
• The two components of genuine connection: psychological safety and interpersonal alignment
• Why the best store leaders are great filters — the critical few, not the important many
• The head of stores as part strategist, part people leader, part bodyguard
• Why hiring across the retail/QSR wall works in both directions
• Where pride actually comes from, and why it fuels the business

Find Blake: LinkedIn and blakedevillier.com · [email protected]

Links referenced in this episode:

• blakedevillier.com
• ronthurston.com

Somewhere between 50 and 70% of people who walk into a store leave without buying anything. Eighty percent of them walked in with an AI-generated answer already in their pocket.

Juan Molina built his career on the moment before that — 3D product visualization at Cylindo and Chaos, making a product look convincing on a screen. Now, at Rallyware, he works the moment after: the ten seconds when a real person, standing in front of a customer, either closes the sale or doesn't.

Twenty years after "360-degree view of the customer" became a boardroom phrase, the store is still a black box. Juan calls the gap the in-aisle decision moment — Google's Zero Moment of Truth, for the sales floor.

The number that should worry every retail leader: under 15% of associates engage with voluntary training, and most of what lands is forgotten within days. Not laziness — the day in the life of a frontline associate isn't built for homework. Juan's CEO put it simply: "Every time I walk into a retail store, we're nowhere to be found."

From there: the real math behind "false" turnover, why associates avoid products they don't understand, and Juan's case for treating the device in an associate's hand as a revenue driver, not a cost center. It closes on something Juan didn't plan to say — that his own career has quietly made him an acolyte of the frontline associate's moment of decision.

In this episode:

• Why 80% of shoppers now walk in more informed than the associate helping them
• The in-aisle decision moment, and why the store is still a black box
• The real reason training doesn't stick
• What actually separates an associate who converts from one who doesn't
• Turning device spend into revenue per device
• Who Rallyware is built for, and who it's not
• One mindset shift for NRF and the holiday season

Find Juan on LinkedIn

Learn more about Rallyware here

Find Ron: ronthurston.com

AI can write an email that sounds exactly like you. It can personalize at a scale no sales team ever could. And that is precisely why the inbox stopped working. When every message sounds human, none of them get read.

Eric Aubertin, founder and CEO of truelynk (https://truelynk.com), has built his sixth company on the one thing buyers still trust: a warm introduction from someone they know.

Eric's story doesn't start in software. It starts on the ice, drafted by the Montreal Canadiens and playing for Canada. Since then he has started, built and sold company after company. truelynk is number six, and it rests on a simple observation: the vouch, the "you need to talk to this person," is the most valuable and most wasted asset in business.

Ron is an advisor to truelynk, disclosed up front in the episode.

IN THIS EPISODE

• Why nobody buys retail technology off a demo
• The blind spot in LinkedIn: everybody is connected, nobody knows who actually knows who
• What AI did to cold outreach, and why the human became the filter
• Relationship ratings, and sorting 30,000 connections in minutes instead of months
• Quality introductions versus matchmaking, and how advisors get paid
• Who the platform is for on both sides, and who should not bother
• Why 85% of decisions start with a referral, and what it would take to make that a channel
• The lesson Eric believes more deeply now than when he started: this is an engagement problem

LINKS

• truelynk — https://truelynk.com
• Become a truelynk advisor — https://truelynk.com/advisor
• Eric Aubertin on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericaubertin/
• Ron Thurston on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/rthurston/
• Ron Thurston — https://ronthurston.com
• The newsletter — https://ron-thurston-newsletter.netlify.app/

If this conversation changed how you think about how you sell, who you know, or who vouches for you, pass it on to someone who needs to hear it.

Subscribe and follow.

Thank you!

Ron

S3E4 — Balance Is Bullsh*t: Cut Your Life From 25 Things to 5 with Loretta Soffe

Retail in America · Season 3: The Human Edge of Selling

She pulled into her driveway with her hands still on the wheel and couldn't get out of the car. Inside the house: three kids, a husband who had paused his legal career for what they thought would be one year and became twelve. Outside: the title, the corner office, the private plane, the front row at fashion week. Everything in the picture was perfect, and she was completely, quietly exhausted.

Loretta Soffe spent 25 years climbing Nordstrom — sales floor to Executive Vice President of a $2 billion division — until the day she was fired at the peak. Asked recently whether she'd have quit if they hadn't fired her, she stopped cold: probably not. That's what golden handcuffs do.

What she figured out afterward became a book, a framework, and this conversation.

The Edge: The 25-to-5 exercise. Write down 25 things sitting on your calendar, your to-do list, your phone, your brain. Now force it down to five. Loretta runs this with rooms of women aged 20 to 65, and what falls off is never what people expect — the cupcakes for the soccer team, the recurring meeting that recurs for no reason. What's already gone is fitness. Date nights. The things that mattered. The audit is where the aha lives, and it's the one step of her Self Architect Method she goes deep on here.

The Truth: Trying to do all things, all the time, at once gives you exactly two outcomes — burnout or mediocrity. The alternative isn't balance. It's going 150% in when it counts, with the confidence that the rest of your life is built to hold. And that requires letting go of a standard of success you never chose in the first place.

Also in this episode: why what got you here is exactly what stops you from seeing you're drowning. Why your network is your net worth, and why mentorship runs both directions. And the hardest chapter in her book — "A Boss, a Bitch, or a Bold Brave Leader" — on the reorg where the men were praised as efficient and direct for the same decisions that got her called difficult, overanalyzing, and slow.

🎧 Subscribe to Retail in America at ronthurston.com

📚 Books Retail Pride — amazon.com/dp/1544509456 Human Pride — geni.us/humanpride Balance Is Bullshit by Loretta Soffe — amazon.com/dp/B0FMNMNNXZ

🔗 Find Loretta Web: lorettasoffe.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/loretta-soffe/ Instagram: @loretta_soffe All links: linktr.ee/lorettasoffe

Follow Ron linkedin.com/in/ron-thurston/ Instagram: @retailpride ronthurston.com

The Human Edge, Amplified — with Tulsi Keshkamat (Microsoft Teams for Frontline)

What if the technology to transform your frontline already exists — and you're already paying for it?

In this episode of RETAIL IN AMERICA, sponsored by Microsoft, Ron Thurston sits down with Tulsi Keshkamat to unpack one of retail's biggest blind spots: the gap between what frontline technology can do and what most retailers realize they already have. Tulsi shares why Microsoft Teams is far more than a meetings-and-email tool for corporate, and how it's quietly becoming the operating system for the people who actually run the store floor.

The conversation moves from the practical to the profound — from cutting a store walkthrough's documentation time in half with voice-based checklists, to giving every frontline worker a "digital identity," to the bigger truth underneath it all: as AI and agentic commerce reshape retail, the human connection on the floor becomes more valuable, not less. Tulsi's design philosophy says it best — use technology for the mechanics, but leave the meaning untouched, and create more space for it.

For any retail leader weighing how to bring AI and digital tools to their frontline without losing the human core of the work, this is a roadmap — and a reminder of why the people closest to the customer matter more than ever.

In this episode:

• Why there's a massive "awareness gap" around frontline technology — and why many retailers already own the license
• How frontline workers deliver some of the fastest, clearest ROI of any tech investment
• The difference between deploying for big-box operations (inventory, labor) vs. luxury (the associate-customer relationship)
• How voice is removing the "heads-down" drudgery of store walkthroughs and checklists
• Why Teams acts as a platform that reduces the number of apps a frontline worker juggles — not adds to them
• The link between giving managers time back and frontline retention, career conversations, and pride in the work
• Where AI fits: handling the mechanics so humans can focus on judgment, connection, and meaning
• How to start: pick one or two use cases, pilot in a couple of stores, and scale from there

Resources mentioned:

• Microsoft Frontline sessions: aka.ms/frontlineFridays
• Contact the Teams Frontline team: [email protected]

This episode is sponsored by Microsoft.

🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Retail in America on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

This episode features a sponsored conversation with Microsoft. Product capabilities and outcomes may vary by organization, and not all results or claims discussed are guaranteed. Any references to features in preview or development are subject to change

The entire retail sales-training industry is built on scripts and closing techniques. Daria Tcherkachina threw both out — and built a career proving they were never the point.

In this episode, Daria and Ron make the case that customer service is the most underrated revenue strategy in retail, and that the human standing on your floor is the asset most businesses are quietly wasting.

Daria's 22 years span door-to-door sales, luxury floors at Harry Rosen, a bespoke suiting studio whose clients included Drake, and building Lighthouse Immersive's retail operation across 27 markets from scratch. She now runs PUBLC SERVICE.

What you'll hear:

• Why curiosity — not closing — is the glue holding her five-element framework together (Purpose, Presence, Connection, Curiosity, Care)
• Why "presence" is measurable, not a feeling: the sum of every operational decision made before the customer walks in
• The closed loop that quietly kills sales: businesses underinvest in training, staff feel undervalued, customers feel nothing, numbers suffer — each side waiting for the other to move first
• Her one Monday-morning shift for any leader: give your team individual purpose before every shift. "It costs nothing. It takes 60 seconds."

Find Daria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariatcherkachina/