Category: News, Views & Reviews
Retailers now have at least ten workable ways to know what is actually on the shelf and available to be shopped, from ceiling cameras to robots to RFID to the phone in an associate's or a CPG partners pocket. After years of pilots, none of them has clearly won the category, and none of them them individually are likely to! And unfortunately the elusive answer looks quite different from what most technology evaluations are built to find, and it starts with questions most buying processes never ask.
My in-stock is 99% and my OTIF is 99%. I am doing very well, right? Maybe not. Those numbers are true and beside the point, because they measure whether product exists somewhere in the system, and the shopper only experiences whether it is on the shelf. That gap now gets exposed twice on every trip, once by the customer and once by the picker shopping on their behalf. Sam Walton said it plainly decades ago: the customer is the only real boss, able to fire everyone in the company simply by…
Nearly six years ago Walmart sent 500 shelf-scanning robots home after concluding that workers picking online orders could see the same gaps for free. Last week Instacart paid to turn that idea into a platform. The deal drops a third capture model into a race where autonomous robots and ceiling cameras already run chainwide at named retailers on two continents, and the method each grocer picks will shape what shelf data brands are eventually offered. The economics of the three approaches diverge more than the technology does.
n 2012, Dollar Shave Club spent $4,000 on the YouTube video that built the brand. This month, it spent a tenth of that on a campaign it calls the most successful it has ever run, and the outside shop that made its earlier ads is likely to see less work as a result. The production model behind that number now stretches across consumer goods advertising, from a challenger razor brand to the category's largest advertisers, and the early returns include one documented consumer backlash.
Grocery suppliers now put a larger share of sales into technology than the retailers they sell to, and the gap widened in a single year. Buried in FMI's 77th annual industry benchmark is a stranger finding: the share of suppliers raising their technology budgets is well ahead of the share who expect those budgets to improve their bottom lines. The gap between those two numbers has a name, and anyone who has run a pilot knows it.
For two years, the marquee nuclear power deals have all read the same way: a tech giant buys a reactor's output to feed an AI data center. Walmart just signed one too, to power a giant refrigerator.
A few hundred retail media networks are chasing a slice of growth that two companies have already mostly claimed. The IAB now says the networks that survive the next three years will be the ones that make a deliberate strategic choice, and the ones sorted out by the market will be the ones that drifted. For the brands writing the checks, the framework doubles as a tool: a way to read which networks below Amazon and Walmart are building something worth funding.
This week Amazon showed off a warehouse robot you can direct in plain language, no code required. It arrived in an odd context. One of its largest grocery rivals had just written down billions on the automated-warehouse model it spent years building, while another is quietly pushing robots into the backs of its stores. Three of the largest retailers in the country are placing very different bets on how automation should work, and the gap between them says more about the next few years of online order economics than any single…
Five months ago, Instacart launched embedded checkout inside ChatGPT. This week, it landed inside Claude with a connector that deliberately stops short of that. The terms got more cautious, not less, and that tells you more about where agentic grocery commerce actually is than any of the launch announcements have. Inside: what changed between the two deals, and what brand and retail teams should do about it before the next assistant signs on.
The promotional levers grocers have relied on for decades are losing force against a shopper who cross-shops before they see the circular, and the internal conversations at major U.S. retailers about where margin comes from next are moving in a direction fresh suppliers should be paying attention to. The answers are showing up in capital decisions made in the last two quarters, and the implications reach directly into the 2026 joint business planning cycle.
In-store audio has been the retail media format CPG buyers most consistently defer, not because the audience isn't there, but because the measurement has never been good enough to justify a serious budget line. Dollar General's announcement this week changes the scale of that conversation.
The skilled trades labor shortage is costing the residential construction industry $10.8 billion a year in lost production. Lowe's and Home Depot are both spending to fix it, for reasons that go beyond philanthropy, and they are doing it in ways that reveal something meaningful about how each defines its relationship with Pro customers.
