Discover more from Future Commerce
Episode 109
May 24, 2019

Mood Ring Garter Belts by Subscription

One of these things is not like the other: Arby's x Birchbox, $88 rental products from Urban Outfitters and a prediction of Kohl's having a potential suitor. Listen now!

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this episode sponsored by

One of these things is not like the other: Arby's x Birchbox, $88 rental products from Urban Outfitters and a prediction of Kohl's having a potential suitor. Listen now!

Show Notes:

Main Takeaways:

  • Urban Outfitters has a new rental-subscription service, but will GenZ even care?
  • 23andMe teams up with Airbnb to help consumers with their travel plans: is this super creepy, or genius?
  • Amazon wants to create wearables that can sense emotions, just in case they don't have enough consumer data.
  • Dress Barn closes 650 stores because shuttering stores is what all the cool kids are doing according to Coresight.

Urban Outfitters: Will Their Rental-Subscription Appeal to GenZ?

Airbnb Teams Up With 23andMe For a Heritage Based Travel Collab:

Amazon Wants to Know All Your Feelings All The Time:

Store Closings Aren't Stopping Soon: Boring Retail is Dying:

24 Month Prediction: Could Amazon Aquire Kohl's?

So now we want to hear from you: What are your favorite collaborations in commerce right now?

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Download MP3 (32.4 MB)


Phillip: [00:01:16] Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast about cutting edge next generation commerce. I'm Phillip.

Brian: [00:01:21] I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:01:22] We have exactly five stories today. Five, five news stories out of 20. These are the top five stories of the week. I'm going to run them down. I'm going to run them down. I'm just going to choose five out of this list that...

Brian: [00:01:35] No no no.

Phillip: [00:01:36] How about... You want to... You want to just... Let's do this...

Brian: [00:01:40] Let's alternate.

Phillip: [00:01:41] I'll choose one and then you choose one, and we'll go back and forth.

Brian: [00:01:43] All right. All right. Give me the first one.

Phillip: [00:01:45] All right. Here's the first one. Well, OK. I don't know. I'm going to avoid... I'm going to go with a deep cut because I feel like there's things that can everybody...

Brian: [00:01:56] First?

Phillip: [00:01:56] Anybody could talk about Target...crushing earnings.

Brian: [00:01:58] Wait, isn't all of our stuff deep cut stuff?

Phillip: [00:02:01] I feel like everything is a deep cut. Oh, by the way, remind me to tell you how I'm hacking five star reviews for iTunes because I'm totally going... I want to talk about that. We could do it at the end. Anybody could be talking about...

Brian: [00:02:17] That's a deep cut...

Phillip: [00:02:17] Anybody could be talking about... I don't know... It's earnings week. There's lots of stuff going on. Target's crushing their earnings. That's boring to me. I don't really care about that. You know what I care about? Urban Outfitters is now a subscription product service. Urban Outfitters story over on Forbes. There's really nothing more to say. They have a new rental program called Nuuly, which I'm just gonna ask you to guess how to spell Nuuly.

Brian: [00:02:53] N...

Phillip: [00:02:54] You're wrong in here. N U U L Y. Because that's how things are spelled. And you can borrow six clothing items a month For $88.

Brian: [00:03:04] That's pretty good. That's a really good deal. That's a really good deal.

Phillip: [00:03:08] You know I think it's like the best the best idea of this whole thing is that their target demo is going to ruin all of those clothes every time they wear them, and they're gonna have to buy them.

Brian: [00:03:17] No no no no. They'll ruin them. They'll send them back. And then the team there will be like oh these are awesome. And then they'll keep sending them out.

Phillip: [00:03:22] I kind of freaking love that... By the way this is not the first company to announce this year, rental services. Of course I'm just parroting Forbes at this point, but we've talked about others. We've talked about Rent the Runway, obviously having sort of pioneered that market, or at least pioneered it as far as we understand it, into the digital age. But you know there's all kinds of things... all kinds of brands... I guess Reebok is doing this and Fila... I didn't even know Fila was still around. This last week I learned that K Swiss was still around because I shared the stage with Gary Vaynerchuk.

Brian: [00:04:06] Who?

Phillip: [00:04:07] K Swiss. Remember K Swiss?

Brian: [00:04:07] Yeah I know. I was being mean.

Phillip: [00:04:10] You're being mean.

Brian: [00:04:11] I was being mean.

Phillip: [00:04:12] And I guess Gary Vaynerchuk has a signature shoe or collab with K Swiss or a number of them.

Brian: [00:04:20] How was it meeting Gary V. by the way?

Phillip: [00:04:21] It was interesting. Interesting guy. I can't help but wonder what meeting him would have been like on any other day where Zion Williamson didn't...that the NBA draft didn't happen on that day, and he wasn't like really salty about the New York Knicks having third pick. So the draft lottery happened, and I think that kind of just set his mood for the night. It was kinda fun.

Brian: [00:04:46] It was fun. It was interesting.

Phillip: [00:04:49] It was interesting.

Brian: [00:04:53] All right enough about that.

Phillip: [00:04:54] That's enough about that. OK. Rental services coming from an interesting sort of retail brands. That's kind of cool.

Brian: [00:05:02] I mean we're starting to see these pop up more and more. I think you mentioned that a little bit already, but it seems like something that almost every single fashion apparel brand could have. Just about.

Phillip: [00:05:13] I feel like anyone who has a long view on their customers and wants to increase LTV.

Brian: [00:05:22] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:05:23] This is a really interesting play, where if you can give them sort of your mid range, mid margin/high margin products for more than what their average order value would be on a monthly basis you could get deeper in their pocket over the long term. Like right away.

Brian: [00:05:46] Which to me... I feel like with a company like Urban Outfitters that would be easy but $88 a month I don't think that...

Phillip: [00:05:54] It's seems like a no brainer. And they probably have an experimental target market that doesn't mind getting things they don't really love because they're happy to send them right back. It's probably more about the Instagram like, "Oh look at the box came. It's so weird because it reminds me... Did you know that Arby's did a box?

Brian: [00:06:14] Really? No.

Phillip: [00:06:14] Have you seen this? Yes Arby's did a box. Arby's, for those who are in North America... I don't know if it's a global brand because it's not even a brand I care about. They make roast beef sandwiches. They are like the roast beef, the sliced roast beef sandwich equivalent on like an onion roll of a Burger King. Actually lower. What's lower than Burger King on the burger totem pole?

Brian: [00:06:40] Hmmm. Jack in the Box.

Phillip: [00:06:42] Jack in the Box? Like lower than that.

Brian: [00:06:43] Actually, you're right. I don't know Burger King, Jack in the Box... it's a toss up. I don't know, like Taco Bell.

Phillip: [00:06:50] The brands that you would never have picked to have a subscription box service, for a thousand Alex because that is... What's really interesting about Arby's is they don't even see new food. They send you really random weird branded like apparel.

Brian: [00:07:04] Actually that's kind of awesome. If it was a box service with food, I would be a little nervous about eating it.

Phillip: [00:07:12] For the Arby's brand super fan... I know, right?

Brian: [00:07:13] But random branded apparel? I mean, that's kind of awesome. There should be swag subscription boxes.

Phillip: [00:07:23] Yeah.

Brian: [00:07:23] That's actually kind of awesome. Imagine if you were a B2B buyer and someone sent you swag box every month. One of your vendors. That would be amazing.

Phillip: [00:07:39] I mean... Yeah. Could you think of one more random brand than Arby's to create a subscription box? I know we're not... We were talking about rental. I'm on to something else, but I'm just fascinated.

Brian: [00:07:53] You know what would be more random than that would be like a gas company or something. "Hey thanks for using our gas. Here's a subscription box with all of..." Exxon Mobile subscription box.

Phillip: [00:08:08] Yeah. With their what... What was Exxon's like? Did they have the Pegasus or the... I forget what it is. It's like the logo just emblazoned on like a key ring.

Brian: [00:08:21] Right. A stress ball... You know...

Phillip: [00:08:22] A stress ball... Like a dart gun of some kind...

Brian: [00:08:28] And a pack of gum.

Phillip: [00:08:30] So rental products... so we're going super deep on this one topic. You know what's funny is you see this so much now, I can't help but think so Future Commerce, Future Commerce, Future Commerce... Let's get in that mindset. You look at companies like Borrow Lenses, right? Where you can rent camera gear. And you look at that sort of... I believe that a lot of that sort... And they have a very wide product offering now. Borrow Lenses.

Phillip: [00:09:00] They do all kinds of stuff like drones and they're doing all kinds of stuff. At some point, consumers especially in the gig economy and especially as ownership and the idea of ownership with certain demographics... They decide they don't want to own things anymore they just want to have use of things. As the mindset shifts towards that, when do we start seeing an impact on companies like Canon, on companies like DJI? That they can no longer produce products that can be consumed by the masses and replaced every year.

Phillip: [00:09:37] They're only being consumed by rental and subscription and fractionalized. You can't make very... You cannot make products that are pushing the boundaries of of innovation when you don't have a market to buy it. They only want to rent it.

Brian: [00:09:55] Yeah but think about Canon. They've already kind of faced this problem. Granted it wasn't rentals, but the resale market for lenses and cameras is really strong. So I mean, I feel like this is not a new problem for them. Now clothing... I could see actually being an issue, but...

Phillip: [00:10:17] This is a huge issue.

Brian: [00:10:19] Yeah it could be a huge issue for clothing. I mean and we're already seeing the effect of that. How about story number two? Yeah I get to pick the boring one, which is... CoreSite's forecasting over probably like 12,000 store closures this year. Which is crazy considering that there was only like 6,000 last year. That's double. Double.

Phillip: [00:10:42] We just had some this week, right? Dress Barn closing six hundred and fifty stores.

Brian: [00:10:48] It's crazy. The retail apocalypse is still happening.

Phillip: [00:10:55] Gosh.

Brian: [00:10:57] The good news is there's lots of new retail that's coming. Who needs Dress Barn. Right? I see all the stores that are closing, and I'm like "Yeah I didn't need that brand.

Phillip: [00:11:09] Payless of clothing...

Brian: [00:11:09] I didn't need Wet Seal. Who needs Wet Seal?

Phillip: [00:11:16] Oh my gosh there. There're two words I haven't heard put together in a decade.

Phillip: [00:11:21] I don't know, man, somebody... Well I was gonna say somebody shops Dress Barn, but apparently not enough.

Brian: [00:11:30] Yeah. No one shops at Dress Barn anymore.

Phillip: [00:11:33] It's funny, there is... Have you you heard of...

Brian: [00:11:35] My mom hardly shopped at Dress Barn when it was a thing. Who shopped at Dress Barn?

Phillip: [00:11:41] Have you heard of food deserts?

Brian: [00:11:43] Yeah yeah. Do a little explainify, real quick there, on food deserts.

Phillip: [00:11:49] I heard this really interesting story on NPR about rural America. Sort of the disappearance of grocery chains because they don't really have... Grocery chains have sort of died out, or even independent grocery stores in particular have died out. And what has replaced it are dozens and dozens of dollar stores that only sell preserved food and shelved and canned food. They don't sell fresh produce pretty much at all. So the local grocery store is effectively the Family Dollar. And you see it's pretty pervasive in rural America. I don't know what it's like in the rest of the world, but that's what this new story is about. What's really interesting about that is that you can't even convince chains to come in because they've all sort of closed up and left, and it's creating this, they call it food deserts. The sort of nutrition...the access to nutritious food and fresh produce is basically dried up. And I'm wondering. You have to kind of stay with me.

Phillip: [00:12:56] I'm wondering if there is some sort of parallel to affordable fast fashion because that's how... I don't know. It's a half formed thought. I worry for people that don't have access to malls. That depend on Payless Shoes and depend on Dress Barn and small strip mall brands. I'm serious.

Brian: [00:13:22] No, dude. No.

Phillip: [00:13:22] That that's their access to... I know it's not, it's not haute couture...

Brian: [00:13:27] There is nobody who depends on Dress Barn.

Phillip: [00:13:33] Okay. I think that there is... I feel like somebody could make a case as to why this is going to disproportionately affect the lower middle class of having access. There will be somebody who has to now shop, not a Dress Barn, but at the Dollar Tree for clothing. I think that's sad. Right?

Brian: [00:13:53] No, man. No no no no no no. We have free one day shipping on Amazon. This is not the world we live in anymore. Like we don't...

Phillip: [00:14:04] Have you bought clothes on Amazon?

Brian: [00:14:06] Yeah I totally have.

Phillip: [00:14:07] It's like the worst experience in the whole world.

Brian: [00:14:10] Oh my goodness. No you're totally wrong. Have you tried Prime Wardrobe yet?

Phillip: [00:14:14] I have.

Brian: [00:14:15] It's not bad. It's pretty awesome. They send me stuff for free. You figure out what you want, and then you send stuff back that you don't want. You only pay what you bought.

Phillip: [00:14:25] Yeah. All right, so more stores closing. Yada yada yada.

Brian: [00:14:28] Super exciting. Super exciting.

Phillip: [00:14:32] I love that that's the story you choose. I'm so sorry.

Brian: [00:14:35] Oh it was an easy lead in. It was an easy transition. The low hanging fruit. You know.

Phillip: [00:14:41] Meanwhile. Meanwhile, we have story... Meanwhile... This is just such... This is a Future Commerce story, somehow, but I haven't figured out yet. Let me ask it. So hey, Brian.

Brian: [00:15:00] Hey what, Phillip.

Phillip: [00:15:01] Have you ever... Have you done an ancestry or DNA test of any kind, like 23 And Me?

Brian: [00:15:07] No I haven't yet, Philip. Why do you ask.

Phillip: [00:15:09] But if you were, would you want to like maybe visit the homeland of your ancestors?

Brian: [00:15:15] You know, I bet they'll be really fun. I should probably do it.

Phillip: [00:15:19] And then let's say that if you did that, what service do you think you'd use to book a place to stay while you're there?

Brian: [00:15:26] I don't know.. my standard Hilton app.

Phillip: [00:15:29] No. Well what if I told you that you could have a singular cohesive experience for heritage travel destinations through Airbnb and 23 and Me? Would that be interesting to you? Man, we really milked that.

Brian: [00:15:45] We really did. I mean, this isn't interesting. I kind of like the concept. I feel like the people that do use 23 and Me probably would stay in an Airbnb, actually.

Phillip: [00:15:57] Yeah, right?

Brian: [00:16:00] So it's kind of a cool compliment. Actually I like it. I like the idea. This is another team up. This is another collab. I dig it.

Phillip: [00:16:07] It's a collab.

Brian: [00:16:10] It's a DNA travel collab.

Phillip: [00:16:14] Wow. I like that. You didn't even practice that. That just rolled right off the tongue.

Brian: [00:16:19] Oh yeah. It was so obvious.

Phillip: [00:18:12] Could you think of two more random companies to pair up into what might be an actually intriguing offer?

Brian: [00:18:20] Yeah, this is kind of like....

Phillip: [00:18:23] Arby's and Birchbox.

Brian: [00:18:25] Yeah, exactly. You knew where I was going.

Phillip: [00:18:29] Could you... I don't even like... It's just I'm kind of intrigued. It's like one of those things that I didn't... This is the travel offering equivalent of...

Brian: [00:18:42] Wait, wait, wait, wait... I've got it. This is what's happening here. This is what's happening here. They're connecting you with someone who's distantly related to you, and it's like, "Oh we're reconnecting you with your family" sort of scenario. That's what it is.

Phillip: [00:18:56] So it's like the real life version of what you might have seen it like a Google Super Bowl commercial at some point. Right.

Brian: [00:19:02] Exactly.

Phillip: [00:19:03] They're trying to make you cry, but not for the real...not for the reason that you usually cry with international travel. They want to make you happy somehow, or nostalgic, or I don't know.

Brian: [00:19:15] Well you know what I'd say about this? I think that there are lots more of these types of collabs that could happen that people aren't thinking about yet, and I expect to see Collaboration Commerce to be a trend, a continued trend, coming up in the next couple of years.

Phillip: [00:19:32] I agree with that. I agree with that. We see it in a lot of different places. I find it strange. How does this work? Let's think about this for a second. I am perfectly capable of searching Airbnb for places in Ireland if I am, if I have Irish ancestry. What I don't know that I want is for a partnership between 23 and Me and Airbnb to proactively share that with another service to make a recommendation to me.

Brian: [00:20:03] Yeah that's a little concerning that gets into it like privacy issues. Yeah absolutely.

Phillip: [00:20:07] But somewhere deep in the terms of service you agreed to that. You don't even know it. It's just happened.

Brian: [00:20:14] We're going to match you up with your long lost family.

Phillip: [00:20:18] But like stranger things have happened in this world. Heritage travel from DNA test results that are shared with basically your hotel app. That's a thing now.

Brian: [00:20:29] Nice.

Phillip: [00:20:31] I don't know.

Brian: [00:20:32] You know. Yeah. That's a thing now.

Phillip: [00:20:37] Alright. You've got to whack at number four.

Brian: [00:20:39] Oh I was just thinking about collabs. I was thinking about collabs recently here. I was thinking about collabs because I saw a collab the other day... I might have already mentioned this on the show. I think it was a Woolrich that teamed up to do furniture... Furniture... I forget who it was. I think we've talked about this on the show before.

Phillip: [00:20:55] I remember this. Yeah.

Brian: [00:20:56] I just love outside the box collaboration like that where it's like, "You really love Woolrich, and you really love furniture..." and so putting Woolrich patterns in fabric in to your furniture, that's just super cool. I expect to see more of that. A hundred percent, so.

Phillip: [00:21:14] Yeah. So like, "You really love local law enforcement, and you really love Amazon. Why not allow local law enforcement to use Amazon facial recognition services to spy on you everywhere you go."

Brian: [00:21:27] Speaking of Amazon and recognition devices... Thank you for teeing me up there.

Phillip: [00:21:34] I did.

Brian: [00:21:35] My topic, my article is going to be Amazon is actually working on a wearable device that can read human emotion and is the voice activated.

Phillip: [00:21:46] Wow. You know, it's like what do you get for the person who has everything?

Brian: [00:21:54] I know what you get them. You get them Arby's Birchbox.

Phillip: [00:21:58] Arby's Birchbox. Yeah. And if they already have that, too, then you can get them some sort of wearable device that can broadcast their emotion to everybody.

Brian: [00:22:08] Yeah or detect other people's emotions.

Phillip: [00:22:11] It's interesting. What person needs this?

Brian: [00:22:13] This is going to play into that... I don't know if you remember back when we talked about body data, like all the time... like all the time.

Phillip: [00:22:19] Yeah. Yeah.

Brian: [00:22:20] You know we we still talk about it, but just not all the time.

Phillip: [00:22:24] Just not all the time. Yeah. Right.

Brian: [00:22:25] And I talked about how body data might even change dating because you'll be able to have body monitoring that kind of monitors your mood and can feed that data back to your dating service. I feel like this is going to finally enable that.

Phillip: [00:22:47] But I mean just to be clear this is a patent filing, and not necessarily a product.

Brian: [00:22:51] No certainly not. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:22:53] What's interesting is that, I think voice...stress level and voice or other cues in voice have previously appeared on the show. I remember a story, and I was trying to source it before the show because it just came to mind recently. We talked about a story not so long ago where researchers have found based on speech patterns that they could make a pretty accurate, within 5 % margin of error, guess about the person's weight. Do you remember this whole thing?

Brian: [00:23:26] Yeah, vaguely.

Phillip: [00:23:26] We can infer a lot...stress level, gender, I guess emotional disposition or...

Brian: [00:23:39] Health. Health in general, as well. For instance right now everyone can probably tell that I have a cold. Yeah. Computer you pick that up really easily.

Phillip: [00:23:49] Yeah exactly. But for whatever reason my voice typing routinely gets things wrong. Which, by the way, if you're looking for some amusement go check out the sub Reddit "Bone Apple Tea" which is like "Bon Appetit," but you know...

Brian: [00:24:09] Oh man I have had some terrible scenarios with that before. It's usually like that voice mail. Voice mail readers are the worst. They must not use actual like voice technology.

Phillip: [00:24:20] They definitely don't use the same thing that Google's voice service uses.

Brian: [00:24:23] They can just run it through Google. Come on guys. Come on T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T.

Phillip: [00:24:30] Then they'd probably have to pay Google. And like we all want them to share our data with Google. Speaking of Google, it's popping up on me now. All right. So is that four stories? Do we have a fifth?

Brian: [00:24:41] I feel like we did not take this one to its limit.

Phillip: [00:24:44] Okay.

Brian: [00:24:45] No, it's all good. We'll go to the next one. I feel like you kind of called it out. It's just a patent. It's not real yet. Let's wait till it's a real. Then we can talk about it. We can talk about emotion detecting. It's just a great topic in general, though. I feel like retailers everywhere, this is their end game.

Phillip: [00:25:05] It's funny because I think they're already somewhat aware of it. I remember someone who is head of innovation at Kohl's, which by the way might be the last story here. Head of innovation at Kohl's was exploring the use of different colored shopping baskets to sort of convey whether or not to talk to somebody. This was in our recap of Future Stores Miami 2019. I think you're going to Future Stores Miami or Future Stores Seattle in two weeks?

Brian: [00:25:34] Yeah, looking forward to that.

Phillip: [00:25:35] Pretty freaking cool really. They're doing some really cool store tours that you should definitely check out. I'm a big fan of Rapha, and I think they still have openings there, so you definitely should check it.

Brian: [00:25:43] I will.

Phillip: [00:25:46] But anyway, so they were experimenting with this idea of...red basket means you can approach me and talk to me, and talk to me about product offerings, and ask me if I need help. Black basket is like stay away, I don't wanna be bothered. And it's interesting because, I think Samsung had mentioned on the same panel, that in their Samsung retail stores they train employees to not approach or bother people that have two hands on their phone. When someone is standing, looking at the phone with two hands on it it means they're in their world. And I feel like we are getting more savvy to understand people's body language and people's attention and their gaze. And we're getting more savvy to pick up on those sorts of nonverbal cues as to whether or not they should be interrupted or bothered. If we're teaching retail associates to do that, I feel like people in real life are probably able to figure that out, which means I don't know that we need to be wearing dresses that change color when we're angry. But that's just me.

Brian: [00:26:45] It's like a mood ring, you know.

Phillip: [00:26:49] Like a garter belt that is like a mood ring. That's what that's what everybody's ever wanted.

Brian: [00:26:56] Exactly.

Phillip: [00:26:57] And you can rent it for $88 a month from Urban Outfitters.

Brian: [00:27:02] That is definitely where that belongs.

Phillip: [00:27:05] Because it's a mood ring. Right?

Brian: [00:27:09] I feel like maybe that belongs in the Arby's box.

Phillip: [00:27:14] It's in the Arby's... If we could bring this full circle... If you had a 23 and Me test in your Arby's box that you got from your rental service from Urban Outfitters, it would just like be absolutely choice.

Brian: [00:27:25] This is why so many stores are closing.

Phillip: [00:27:30] Speaking of which so... OK. Last story I'll just kind of throw it out there.

Brian: [00:27:34] Story six!

Phillip: [00:27:35] Yeah. Is it six? Or was that four? I think you miscounted.

Brian: [00:27:38] Oh you're right.

Phillip: [00:27:40] This is five.

Brian: [00:27:42] All right do it. Five.

Phillip: [00:27:43] Last one. Number five. Couldn't get by it. I opened with, "We're not talking about Target," but we will talk about Kohl's. Kohl's earnings... Terrible. In the toilet. Missing expectations all across the board.

Brian: [00:28:00] You want to talk about someone who's doing poorly when we have Target who's killing it?

Phillip: [00:28:04] Fine. Yeah. We're not gonna talk about Target crushing it. We're talking about Kohl's because I think there's something really interesting happening there.

Brian: [00:28:11] All right. Lay it on.

Phillip: [00:28:12] So this story's kind of been everywhere, but one thing that I think is interesting about the Kohl's earnings story and sort of everybody being on edge about it is that it comes right before they launch their collab with with Amazon to accept Amazon returns. So. OK. By the way, I have to... Sorry. Someone will correct me, so I'm going to correct myself. They had an earnings beat a quarterly earning revenue beat but they their earnings per share, as estimated by the markets were a miss. So just to be totally clear. And by the way, J.C. Penney and Nordstrom both missed in the same day.

Brian: [00:29:06] It's not surprising. Yeah well it's a little surprising.

Phillip: [00:29:10] But we've come to expect it. By the way, retail since Q4 of 2018 not doing so hot.

Brian: [00:29:20] But when you say that you mean like it's not doing so hot for one quater. in the weeks or hovering like quarter..

Phillip: [00:29:26] It's what Steve Dennis might call the boring middle.

Brian: [00:29:30] Exactly. Yeah. Well it also... Those numbers that came out... when they say retail, they often include a lot of stuff that may have a drastic effect on that...like gas, buying gas is included in those retail numbers oftentimes. So maybe people decided not to drive more. Maybe they spent more time shopping online or on their phones, which is very clear that e-commerce is up significantly. So I don't know. I would love to see our stats peoples get a little more specific about what retail shopping actually means.

Phillip: [00:30:14] Ok, well but that doesn't feed the insatiable news cycle. The point that I think I'm trying to get to is, I think we're about to see a whole new generation of Kohl's shoppers because I think there are...there's a demographic of a person who buys almost exclusively everything on Amazon that will use Kohl's as a return destination, and they'll convert those people into shoppers at Kohl's. It's going to happen.

Brian: [00:30:41] How fast does Amazon buy Kohl's? If this is successful. How fast they buy it?

Phillip: [00:30:45] It's gotta happen, right? This is like a trial balloon.

Brian: [00:30:49] It's a no-brainer. Yeah exactly right. That's exactly right. Well maybe it won't be Kohl's. Maybe they'll abandon Kohl's and say, "Hey thanks for the help!" and go buy someone else, but they're going to buy some big retailer. Some retail chain is going to get purchased by Amazon.

Phillip: [00:31:04] I'll tell you right now It's not going to be Target or Walmart, right?

Brian: [00:31:08] Nope.

Phillip: [00:31:08] Because I think they look too much like... What's interesting is that Target looks like...has too much overlap with other businesses that Amazon's already in. They already have grocery, they have a home delivery.

Phillip: [00:31:21] You know you look at Kohl's, it doesn't have those things. I think you're spot on, in that if we had to read some tea leaves, I think 24 months from now we're talking about a Kohl's acquisition. That's what I'm thinking.

Brian: [00:31:34] Or Best Buy or both. Honestly.

Phillip: [00:31:35] It could really honestly be either/or, but I think Kohl's has the natural tie-in because they already have the partnership. I think it's a matter of time before they're proving out the theory that people want to interact with Amazon in IRL.

Brian: [00:31:50] Totally. Totally.

Phillip: [00:31:52] The returns will convert customers to Kohl's, and they'll get roped into the loyalty program ,just like a lot of people are, with the whole Kohl's cash. They'll find the same products that they're probably buying on Amazon anyway...mid to low level Nike's and run of the mill Levi's, and they'll be like, "Oh wait a second. I don't have to wait two days for this, and I don't have to pay $149 a year for it...".

Brian: [00:32:14] Not two days. One day, man.

Phillip: [00:32:15] Well you say one day, but I'm in West Palm Beach, Florida and ain't nobody got one day, so I'm not...

Brian: [00:32:21] Not yet. Not yet, but they're committed to it. They're committed to it. So we'll see what happens.

Phillip: [00:32:27] Yeah and you know what, three years ago we were talking about eVTOL and drones dropping stuff off everywhere. I'll believe it, when I see it.

Brian: [00:32:33] I mean, you did see the video of the blimp, right?

Phillip: [00:32:37] I did. I saw the blimp video. I'll take a blimp. Give me a blimp.

Brian: [00:32:41] That was funny. That made me laugh pretty hard.

Phillip: [00:32:44] So that's it. Five stories. 30 minutes. All the best news once a week. Future Commerce. Like and subscribe. What else could we say? Oh retail tech moves fast,

Brian: [00:32:55] But Future Commerce is moving faster.

Phillip: [00:32:58] Feel better, dude.

Brian: [00:33:01] Thanks. I will.

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