Ep. 142 - The Customer's Choice: Why Loyalty is Dead

Shoppers aren’t loyal to logos anymore, they’re loyal to getting exactly what they want, exactly when they want it. When the shelf is empty, the phone in their hand becomes your fiercest competitor. We sit down with retail veteran Michael Graen to unpack a hard reset for modern stores: treat on-shelf availability as a mission-critical KPI, use sensors to see the truth in real time, and let AI prioritize the few fixes that protect the most customers and the most sales.

Michael demystifies RFID as core retail infrastructure, brilliant for apparel, general merchandise, tires, and now perishables where date-aware tags prevent expired sales, while being honest about limits in water and metal-heavy items. We walk through how shelf-scanning robots, fixed cameras, Bluetooth, and 2D barcodes create a sensor fabric that answers two essential questions: what do we have, and where is it? Then comes the part most retailers miss, turning those answers into action before the shopper gives up. Think thermostat, not thermometer.

Service isn’t a nice-to-have; it is the differentiator. We talk about the lost 10‑foot rule and why associates are buried in tasks instead of helping people. Michael shows how AI can change that day-to-day reality by collecting overnight, ranking the five actions that matter each morning, and freeing teams to greet, guide, and sell. He also teaches the consumer decision tree, brand, form, scent, feature, so gaps get fixed in order of what customers actually choose. From vertically integrated winners to complex mass merchants, the path forward is the same: tighter collaboration, role clarity, and a handful of KPIs that everyone lives by.

If you lead in retail or supply chain, this is a practical playbook for fewer empty shelves, smarter labor, and trips that feel human again. Subscribe for more conversations like this, share it with a teammate who owns store execution, and leave a review with the one change you’ll make this week.

Connect with Michael Graen:

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgraen/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgraen/)
Email: Mike.graen@collaborateretail.com
Supply Chain Video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TY9xsT6S75A (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TY9xsT6S75A)

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Well, hello everyone, and welcome to Doing Business in Bentonville. I'm Andy Wilson, and I am so glad that you are turned you are tuning back in with us today. So thank you so much. We've had wonderful growth last year, and we have a strong year this year. And so thank you. Thank you for um checking us out. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for communicating with me on LinkedIn. I appreciate that. So keep that up. Now we're going to get straight away to our guest today. Michael Grain, welcome. Thank you. Great to be here, Andy. It is so great. Now, this guy's amazing. Okay. Just let me just tell you a bit about him. He is he has 42 years experience. And he's worked with Park and Gamble. He's worked at Walmart. He's he's worked at Crossmart. He's an expert when it comes to um RFID. Wow. So Michael, tell the folks a bit about you, and then I am looking at an article that you posted uh on social media where you attended a 2026 event. And it's excellent done. Your article is. And when I read that article, I I think I emailed him that that day and said, Michael, we have to talk about this. You know? It's it's amazing the pace of change. Yes, it is. You talk about that in this article. Shh. Wait a minute, talk about yourself for a moment, and then let's just get into this. Well, I'll be happy to.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Um, so for those of you who have uh coming back, you've probably heard some of this before. I think I've did some of this before, but uh my name is Michael Grain. Um I have been living in the Northwest Arkansas area since 1989. Uh, I am married to my best friend. We just celebrated our 46-year wedding anniversary. Congratulations. And uh thank you very much. Um, and probably like you, I kicked my coverage for sure. Definitely. Um, but but live in Northwest Arkansas, uh, had two kids. Uh one unfortunately passed away when she was 34. She had a heart attack very unexpectedly. Uh, but my son, who is a little bit younger than her, actually went and joined Walmart, kind of like his old man, and he is now a market asset protection manager out in Denver, Colorado. So he's making sure that the assets in Walmart stores are taken care of and doing a great job there. So um, just as a hobby, um, my wife and I love to go RVing, um, and we have a R V that we take around the country. Um, I have the the blessing to be able to work and work and do fun stuff at the same time. And so we she travels with me every time we go. Uh, and I'm uh as a hobby, I love to do woodworking and um actually do podcasting uh slash videos for a dear friend of mine who actually is a woodworker. So um then I spend probably at least 10 or 12 hours a week at church. I've been running sound and technique technology at Fellowship Church for gosh, about 20 years now. So that's a little bit about me. And I think that's how we met somewhere a little bit. I think it is at the sound booth. There was a, yeah, there was a there was an event at the cross church, and I was running sound that day, and you came up and asked me a question, and that's you sort of hit it off.

From Hype To Must-Work Solutions

SPEAKER_00 3:34

That's right. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, it's great. You know, Michael, you said something that I'd like to start with today, and I think this is a powerful statement in your article. You said, I have learned to pay close attention when the industry stops talking about what might work and starts aligning around what must work. Unpack that. That's powerful.

Customers Choose Products, Not Retailers

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Um, I I I I the reason I wrote this article was after three days or at uh National Retail Federation, NRF in New York, and there were thousands and thousands of people there. It was back to pre-COVID kind of days. It was packed, and the floor, the expo floor was packed, and a lot of energy and excitement, et cetera. But but Andy, they all started talking about new capability to solve old problems. Well, we can do this. Uh I'll give you an example. Um, is the product on the shelf? Well, we can run an algorithm and see, okay. Or we can have a robot go down the aisle and see, okay. Or we can have RFID fix it, or, or, or, and they want to pontificate about all of these various ways to do it. And honestly, we've been having these same discussions for 20 years. Let's just do it and try it and see if it works. And so, you know, I'm a firm believer in a good idea executed better is better than one that's perfect and stays on the grinding wheel forever. And we tend to talk about the same stuff over and over and over again, the same problems and the same opportunities, but let's just go try it. Um, so that was my a little bit of that because everybody at their booth was very excited about the new things they had. And I'm thinking to myself, there's nothing new about that. That's been around for about 15 years. You should be thinking about really what's new. And that to me, the space, the the customers at the end of the day, have got these things, Andy. Uh, they never had these things before, right? This is a way that they can get what they want when they want it. And they don't have loyal to the retailers anymore. They're not loyal to Walmart or Target or Home Depot or whatever. They're loyal to the products that they want. So if the retailer doesn't have it, oh, it says we have five, but we don't have any, they're going to use their phone and get on the phone and use the retailer's website, thank you very much, to buy buy it from somebody else and have a delivery to the house. It happens all the time. It happens all the time. So we need to quit talking about this stuff and really recognize that the customer, Mr. Sam said it, the customer can fire me every single day by choosing to spend their money somewhere else. And we have to live that principle and figure out how do we not let that happen.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Well, you're correct about that. So if you are a retailer today, knowing what you just said, then talk about RFID and you and I said to become a retail infrastructure. Talk about that. What if you're a retailer, okay, and you know you can be fired. So walk us through your article. Talk to us and teach us as a retailer how we do this.

Sensors Need Action, Not Just Data

SPEAKER_01 7:07

Yeah. Um, the first is you have to make it a decision that having the products on the shelf for customers to buy or having your associates pick on behalf of a customer's order is a priority or priority to you. So you got to make the decision right now that this is an important metric. If this KPI or key performance indicator is just as important as sales or dollar labor or any of those other kinds of things out there. So the first is I have to be able to measure it. And secondly, I have to be able to make improvements if it's not where it's supposed to be. Um, RFID plays a role. Okay, I just told you I'm a big woodworker, right? Are you a woodworker? No, woodworking? Okay. But but play this out for me. In my woodworking shop, I probably have eight to ten different ways to cut a board. And you go, well, what do you need on that for? Well, sometimes you want to cross-cut it against the grain, sometimes you want to rip it with the grain, sometimes you want to do a scroll cut, sometimes you want to do this, sometimes you want to do that. There's different ways to cut a board. Not every tool in my workshop does a good job of cutting the board the way I want to. So RFID is one of those tools. It is a tool that happens to work really, really well with things like apparel and general merchant merchandise and automotive tires. And just recently, to actually put RFID tags on food, specifically bread, meat, produce, et cetera, because in addition to knowing what you have and where is it located, which RFID is important, it can tell you all those loads of red out there, which three need to be marked down. It actually has the date built into it. So I never sell any customer out of data product. So RFID plays a really good role. RFID would probably never work on a can of green beans or a watermelon. There's too much water and metal, et cetera. So there's different tools. Maybe it's a robot, maybe it's a fixed camera, maybe it's something like that. But the bottom line is if I run a retail store and I have apparel items and I have general merchandise items and I have food items, RFID is a very important tool in the toolbox, but it's not the only tool because it doesn't meet the entire need of the room.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Well, you know, you talk about a sensor-driven um vitality is closing the executive gap where you said here, RFD alone, as you mentioned, does not solve retail execution challenges. So expand on that because I I felt that paragraph was very interesting as you talked about it.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Yeah, so um probably the biggest thing, if you if you ran retail stores forever, and if I gave you a real-time tool that you could literally look down on the store, take the lid off the store, and every single item. So this is an item that you would sell in a store, I can see that there's three here, there's two here, and there's five here. Just knowing where it is isn't sufficient. I got to take action. Let me give you an example. I have four of these phones sitting in the back room. I'm supposed to have three of these phones on the sales floor, and I have none on the sales floor. They're all in the back room. So RFID tells you what do I have and where is it located? I still have to drive action. The associate still has to go get those from the back room and put them on the sales floor, or RFID doesn't do me any good. It's it's it's critical that we have our associates stop collecting data. Our associates scan stuff, they take pictures of stuff, they RFID cycle count, and then we don't give them the tools to really say, hey, we've done all that for you. You just started your go and do take care of these three problems to get stuff back on the shelf, and then you're freed up for the rest of the day to take care of customers, which is what we really want you to do anyway. Right. So the idea is just measuring it and not doing anything about it. One more quick example example. On your wall at home, what do you have to control the temperature? What do you use at your home? Thermostat. Thermostat. What are the two things a thermostat does? It lowers and raises. It measures first. It measures and then it adjusts. Yeah. Would you ever put a thermometer on your wall?

SPEAKER_00 11:43

No.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Why?

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Because it doesn't do either. It measures, but it measures. But that's it. That's what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Yeah. Use that analogy, okay? We've got a bunch of stuff out there which are thermometers. It measures what's going on. I love it. We don't have action to take care of to fix it. And we all want to be thermostats. We don't want to be thermometers. That's a great example.

AI’s Real Job: Prioritization

SPEAKER_00 12:06

That's a really great example. I I think in analogies. You talk about AI's real job at a retail store is prioritization. Um and you you you talked about, which I thought was, you know, you talked about at the uh NRF that artificial intelligence was everywhere. And but the most credible conversation reflected on a clear shift of mindset. Talk about that. I thought that was a really interesting uh observation you made. So AI is the future.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

You can't go anywhere without talking about AI or figuring out how you could use it in a different way, et cetera. Um it's incredible. It is clearly the future, right? But the way it becomes powerful is when you feed it good data. It's like any other system. If I feed it garbage data, I'm gonna get garbage results. And to me, that's what everybody gets so excited about AI, but in a lot of places, basic foundational business tools or business measurements, like is everything on the shelf? Did I actually get 100% of what I paid for from that vendor? What just left the store that didn't get paid for? These are all very important metrics from a business standpoint that if I have AI on top of them, does marvelous things. But if I don't have that today in the normal Walmart store, we receive stuff off the back of the truck. Do we count it? No, we don't, especially if it comes from RDC. We assume we got it all. And then during the inventory process, we stop the store and we count everything and we calculate what do we have versus what are we supposed to have. And typically we're short, right? We short of what we thought we would have. And so we write down that number and hey, we did really, really good, but unfortunately, we still lost X percent. Okay, let's just say 2%. I lost 2% last year. Was that good or bad? Well, my goal was five. Okay, well, then 2% is pretty good. Okay. But where'd the 2% go? Oh, I don't know. It's a self-checkout thing. It's all people are stealing from self-checkout. How do you know that? How do you know it's not we didn't get what we paid for? So AI on top of really, really quality data can do amazing things. But if we have garbage data, I don't know how AI helps us. I think AI in a retail environment can help to prioritize tasks in a store, free up associates to take care of those tasks that they have to absolutely have to do, but then spend more time with customers. And that's that to me is the goal.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Do you see that happening today yet, where the associates actually are spending more time with the customer? Or are we still trying to figure that out? Where are you where do you see that as you look at stores and travel stores and talk to people? What's happening around that space?

Service Erosion And The 10-Foot Rule

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Um, this will probably get me in trouble, but I'll say it. This is my own personal observation based upon the fact that I do a lot of in-store kind of work. Right. Right? I would argue that we are no better than we have been in the last 20 years. Um, I think about Sam Walton's quote of 10-foot rule. Remember the 10-foot rule? If you come within 10 foot of a customer, greet them, tell them hi, we're glad you're here. Go walk any store, not just Walmart, Walmart, Target, Home Deep, whatever, and see if you can even get them to acknowledge you. It's gone, Amy. It is. And I think part of the reason it's gone is they got 27 other little tasks that they have to take care of. Taking care of the customer is not one of them. I think that's actually why some of these do it, and again, I love doing projects at the home, et cetera. If I ever want to go, I'm probably going to a local do-it-yourself hardware store because that's what they do. They provide that service to people. Hey, I'm trying to take this pipe and connect it to that pipe and they don't fit. And how do I do it? Oh, come here, I'll walk you back there and show you how to do that kind of thing, right? They're really good at that. Um, I'd love to say that, you know, the big box retailers are doing the same thing. I I haven't seen it yet. And and again, if we're not paying attention to the customer, how do we know what we're taking? What did what did they try and come in and buy? So we know what they bought. We know how many we get because we have transaction logs, right? We get a customer satisfaction score that's a little smiley face. Give me a scale of one to five. Do we ever say, what are the five things that you came in for that you couldn't find? That's a good question. Hey, why couldn't you find them? Right? All right. We don't ask those questions. We don't ask a customer how you're doing. Um, the the people who are doing online picking are paid to pick so many per hour. And I'm not talking about Walmart, I'm talking about every retailer. So asking them where something is is almost a detraction from that.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

Right? Well, I think they annoy you actually so that you don't want to try to corrupt them from their goal.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

And that's because one of my favorite quotes that Randy Sally and I'll always used to laugh about the problem with reward systems is they work. Retailers are rewarding those pickers to pick a certain number of items on a certain number of pace, and that oftentimes drives in direct conflict with the 10-foot rule, which is if you see them, welcome them, greet them, et cetera, is there anybody to help? Never happens.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Right. So, well, you talk about in your article that the consumer is the ultimate decision maker, and you're talking about that now, I believe, around the consumer, because uh we do hold the right to make decisions at other places. And uh so as you talk about that, is there any other do you want to expand a bit around uh the consumers are the ultimate decision maker? Any thoughts around that? Additional thoughts? How about an example? That'd be great.

Collaboration Across The Retail Chain

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Um and this will get my friends at Walmart mad at me, but I don't care. So I have an RV, and my wife and I were about to go on an RV trip until it snowed, until we got 12 inches of snow. I kind of put that ahead. But anyway, um, I needed a new pin in my receiver to be able to tell my truck. It's part of the process. Mine broke. So I went to the local Walmart store, and they were absolutely out of stock on everything. I think there was a four-foot section, they had a couple things up top, and everything else was an empty shelf. And I asked the young man who was there, I go, Hey, what's going on here? Well, you know, I'm not sure. It could be the weather, it could be that, it could be that. I'm going, what? And it was like kind of dismissed it. And he wasn't being a jerk. He was just saying, sorry, nothing I can do about it. We don't have any in the story. And I walked away going, all right. So I ordered it. I literally used Walmart's Wi-Fi. I ordered it on Amazon and I got it a day or two later, right? And my my reaction was, do they even know? And the answer is no, they have no idea that I got, I went specifically for this item. I couldn't get a different size, I couldn't get a different P. I had this uh item I wanted, and they disappointed me. So I had to get them back back in my truck, you know, orders from Walmart and say, okay, I'll get it in a couple days. I wanted it right then, but I didn't have I didn't have that option, right? How oftentimes does that that happen? It happens all the time. Have you gone into any retail store in the last six months to buy something and they didn't have it? Many times. Yeah. And what do you feel?

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Well, I'm let down, I'm disappointed. Yeah. Uh, you know, to your point, the consumer is the ultimate decision maker. And today, as consumers, we have lots of choices. You sure do? We have lots of choices. You sure do. And you know, we have people, we have, you know, people Amazon can get it to you the same day or 24 hours or whatever, and or whoever you choose. So as a consumer, and when I read this, as I thought about it as a consumer, we still are in charge here. And your advice that you're giving retailers is, you know, through your article, uh don't forget that. Correct. Correct. That's the because as you said at the very beginning of the show, consumers can fire you. 100%. I didn't say it. Mr.

Priorities, Role Clarity, And Execution

SPEAKER_01 20:35

Sam said it. Right. Sam Walton said it. You quoted fire. But you quoted, yeah, right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. Which which which means how do you, in fact, so so I understand you have to you have to unload trucks, you have to stock product, you have to make price change. I understand there's tasks that you have to do, but when it comes down to it, there's really three things that you do as a retailer. You stock freight, you take the couple customers' money, and then now in this today is being 2026, I shop on behalf of the customer. Every one of those things are important to do, but without engaging with a customer. Um, to me, is is is the magic, the magic formula. Because I I I can actually get over um not having product in stock every once in a while. But if the ad to the associate is, I don't know, we're never in stock, I don't know what happened, but versus let me see what else I can do. Let me call the other store and see if I could find one for you. Because that would have been, I probably wouldn't have done it, but that would have been a really nice gesture, but they're not trained like that anymore. They don't, they're not trained like you're bringing in family into your store. You want to treat them like family, you don't want to treat them like they're a nuisance. And so we're getting way off the topic, Karenny. But to me, I don't ever feel like I'm welcome in their store. Yeah, I don't feel like everybody actually pays attention to me and says And are you finding everything okay? Anything I can help you with? They just they just don't do that anymore. I think I think we've lost that part.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Well, and I think it's a good point that you're that you're making. And I if you're a real retailer today, I I think you need to be listening to uh what we're talking about today and really thinking about it deeply and and not taking the consumer for granted at all. So, Michael, we you your last piece in the article, you talked about this collaboration. Talk about that. Then what I want you to do is then talk to us about how do you put all this together. Give us some advice on this and suggestions. But talk about uh I I did I thought we were you talked about collaboration. I thought that was a really interesting talk. Yeah. Um well, first off, that's the name of my company.

Collaboration LLC: What Michael Does

SPEAKER_01 22:54

Correct collaboration now I'll see. Yeah, it is. Because I believe it is a foundational element to getting things done. Um I there was a uh, and I'll send you a link that we can put in the description of this, but there is a uh really cool video that I show when I go teach at the University of Arkansas and stuff. And it's how is a number two pencil made? Have you ever seen this video before? No. It talks about all of the things that have to happen to make a number two pencil. I'm like, come on, number two pencil is not that complicated. Well, wait a minute. I've got wood, I've got trees to cut down, I've got uh iron in there, I've got metal, which is a little grommet, I've got rubber, I've got all these pieces, and it's a two to three minute video going, here's all the pieces of people that have to work together to make a number two pencil. And you sort of laugh and go, that was really cute. But then you start thinking about there's a hundred and fifty thousand items in a Walmart store. They don't just show up there automatically. There are manufacturers that have to cut down trees and uh you know get raw materials and make the product and then test the quality and then ship them to the district to the to the retailer and they have to flow it through and it has to come in the back room and somebody has to put it on the shelf. All this stuff has to happen. And if you want to see when it doesn't happen, just look at COVID where everything was out of stock, or even this week in Northwest Arkansas, where we got eight inches of snow and everything was gone. That's when it doesn't work. And so collaboration is just saying, we all understand the goal here. Let's get back to the principle. The customer is always right. The customer is the person who makes the purchase decisions in a store. Uh, sometimes they're sometimes they're called the shopper. Um, but they're they're ultimately have the ability to fire you if you don't have their stuff. How do we all work together and make sure we're meeting their needs? And that means the person who's cutting down trees all the way through to the person who's helping the customer put that stuff in their basket. At the end of the day, nothing else matters, Andy. We've got to figure keep that in mind. And everybody else has their little one-off things. That's the one thing great about senior leaders that really communicate well, they always bring you back to the basics. You know, Walmart says saving people money so they can live better. The customer's always right. There's the same 10 rules for running a business. Those kind of principles are in place, not because they just are on a wall somewhere. They're important to make sure that you're successful because you can change the how every day. The foundation of what you are and the culture, et cetera, are things that are not changeable. And you can't do that. So, collaboration to me is another tool in a toolbox. Spect to my thing. If I've got a hundred tools in my toolbox, they all have to work together with my help, obviously, to make a piece of furniture. And they all play an important role. Sometimes they're not needed, but a lot of times they are, and they get put in when they're going. Like any other, one more example, any other sports team, there's 11 people on the field. Well, they all have a role. They all don't get to throw the ball. Some of them get the block and some of them get to catch. But the bottom line is it takes that collaboration uh to be able to deliver guests. Okay, this is great.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Now, we're gonna put a link uh of your article. Okay. Okay. And and then uh so so our guests can click on this and as they watch or listen to the uh podcast, they can also have a link to this that would be attached. Now, um so two things, okay, two other things as as we begin to wrap up here, summarize or give us the top two or three things uh if if you're listening and say, okay, what's the priority here for me? Okay, and then I want you to talk about your company and what you do. Okay. So those are a couple of things let's talk about.

Who’s Doing It Best And Why

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Well, I think the so what. Here's the so what. We used to say, so what, now what? Um at the at the end of the day, a company is there. It most companies are there to meet the needs of their shareholders. And they do that by delivering value that people purchase. Uh, and they do it at a rate of so that they can actually make some profit. Let's just call it what it is. Um this the second part is from my perspective, the people who make the buying decisions to buy that are your most important customer, whatever that is. So recognize that and figure out how are we meeting the customer, how are we not meeting the customer's days, what are we doing well, what do we need to improve, all those other kinds of things. Absolutely. So quit talking about it and do something about because you get what you measure. If you're not measuring your customer satisfaction, if you're not measuring your on-shelf availability, if you're not measuring your pricing and assortment and all those other kinds of things, they will go to somebody that will. Right? We know that. The the history of retail has not been comp to companies like Sears and Kmart, et cetera, when they were used to be number one and they are basically non-existent. So anybody thinks that Walmart or anybody else will be around 100 years from now, that's a bad assumption. Because it's really, really hard. So that's the first one, which is get laser clear on what's important and what do we have to deliver. And then the second thing I would say is you got a team of people, get very clear on role clarity. Okay. Because if I'm trying to win the Super Bowl, that's what we're gonna do. Okay, if I'm Seattle and I'm trying to win the Super Bowl at the beginning of the year, we set that goal as we're gonna win the Super Bowl, and we go, Andy, you're gonna be the quarterback. This is your role, and this is your key performance indicators. Mike Grain, you're the offensive tackle. Your job is to do this. Okay. Clear role definition, and how do we work together? How do we collaborate together to deliver against that? Uh, and then obviously just good communication. So that's that that's my nuggets, which is quit going to conferences and talking about it. Go do it. Yeah, because nine times out of ten, you know the right things to do. You just got to build this team and a structure that delivers against clear goals that are measurable and you know, real clear what everybody's role is.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

You have the store keys that I go to work. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yes, that's what per great summary. Now, talk about your company. Okay, and what you do and and spend time because I find I find it very interesting.

Measure What Matters And Act

AI Will Change Work, Not The Customer

SPEAKER_01 29:39

Well, um, the company is called Collaboration LLC. Um, it is it is very narrow focused primarily on retail, right? It's not on technology necessarily, but it comes after 25 years of working with Procter and Gamble, so I got to sit on the supplier side of the equation. Uh, 15 or so years at Walmart, so I got to see the retailer side, and then a couple of years at Crossmark. So I got a chance to see the three-legged stool of retail, the supplier, the retailer, and the solution provider. So it's always being on all three really helped me because I could sit in a room with all three and go, I know the question they're asking. And I know a real underlying question here is not that, it's something different. I just kind of smile and go on. Collaboration LC is basically taking what I consider to be 45 years of experience at retail. And I'll get I'll tell you the, I'll tell you the the way I try and sell that company. I left Walmart on very good terms, but I'd always worked for Great Big Procter Gambler and Great Big Walmart. I wanted to work with some other retailers and suppliers, et cetera. So I left, not knowing what to expect. Uh, and I got a phone call from Kroger. And Kroger said, Hey, we heard you just left Walmart. Yes, I did. Um, we're starting our RFID program at Kroger. Can you, can we hire you uh to tell us kind of what you did at Walmart? And I said, in all due respect, no, you can't. And they go, What do you mean? They go, I'm not telling you what I did at Walmart. Why not? I'm under NDA. I'm not going to share what I did at Walmart. And I hope you appreciate that I wouldn't share what you're doing with somebody else. I uh uh integrity is very important to me. And so, okay, okay, fine. Thank you very much. I go, wait a minute. Wouldn't you like to know what I did do that was a really big mistake? Like all the all the potholes that I stepped in, because I stepped in hundreds of potholes. And I can tell you what they all are. I can tell you how to avoid them. Does that look like help? That looks like help. So it's really anything, Andy. My company is basically me, me, myself, and I, as not a crew of people around. Um, I'm the CEO and I'm the receptionist, all the way in between. And I work with either solution providers or brand owners or suppliers or a lot of retailers to figure out how you put the puzzle together, how do you take all the pieces that you need. When you need RFID, for example, you need tags, you need hardware, you need software, you need integration, you need processes, et cetera. That's a lot of pieces to the toolbox. And again, my woodworking background said I can build that. I know how to put all the pieces together. So that's my company. I I work for a number, I have a number of different contracts, and I'm just trying to help people get really laser focused on what they have and where is it located. RFID, obviously, a big part of that. Shelf scanning robots are a big part of that. Um uh Bluetooth is a big part of that, 2D barcodes are a big part of there. There's a whole bunch of different sensors that tell you what you have and where located. Putting them together into a retail store is something that I've done a lot and I really enjoy.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

That's well, that's exciting. And what what you have shared with us today is that you look like help, support, knowledge to someone that can guide them through this process. And what you said was so important back to um where a customer can fire the company, and because you don't want to get fired. What you need is help, what you provide is help and support and information, Michael. And that's wonderful. And there's a huge need for that. So, how do people reach you?

SPEAKER_01 33:33

Um, I used to have a website uh and it wasn't getting much traffic, so I'm on LinkedIn for sure. LinkedIn is probably the easiest. The other one is you know, mike.grain at collaborater.com. Okay. Perfect. So that's the easiest way. Those two things are I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I share a lot of my nuggets and things that I hear about you are, you're very active on LinkedIn. I'm very active. I love I love quotes. I'm a big quote person, uh, which is why I quote Sam Walden and Doug so much. Um, quotes have a way of taking really obscure things and really simplifying it. And so I really, really do enjoy that.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

Okay, now I'm gonna put you on a hot seat a bit. And and you're good at that. So if we look at the landscape of retailers today, okay, um, who needs who needs the most help today as you think about the retailers today?

SPEAKER_01 34:35

Mean specific retailers that need help? Yeah. Um, I I'll be honest with you, they all do. Yeah, they all do. Nobody's got it figured out. Okay. Nobody is anyone worse than others. I I think the ones that have got it figured out the most are probably the vertical integrated retailers. What's that mean? People like Carter's. They manufacture the product, they put a tracking RFID tag on that product, they send it to their warehouse, they have it tracked at their warehouse, then it flows into their store. They know how much is on the sales floor, how much is in the back room, how much should we just sell, et cetera. They've got an end-to-end visibility of exactly what they have and exactly where it's located. Why can they do that? Because they're vertically in regenerate. They're making it all the way to selling it, right? Right. Um, I would say people like Nike are very similar in that respect, very vertical owner. The challenge you have if you're a Walmart or a Target or a Kroger, et cetera, is I'm buying stuff for hundreds and thousands of various suppliers. It's harder to know where what do I have and where is it located. So I would say the ones who've got it figured out so far are the vertically integrated ones, but they're very niche players, no offense. But they're very niche players. They're like retail or shoes or whatever. Um, I don't know of anybody who's got it figured out on a broad scale, like a mass merchandiser or or things like that.

SPEAKER_00 36:07

Yeah, Home Depot, uh, Lowe's, Walmart, some of those, they're so massive. It's hard to figure it out.

Consumer Decision Trees In Aisles

SPEAKER_01 36:14

The the other one that I think has it probably better than everybody else, but they're not perfect, is when you have people like Sam's Club in Costco, when you have massive pallets of stuff, you're probably gonna you you can a significantly less assortment. Yeah. So it's much less complicated business. But I can't remember the last time I went to a Sam's Club and they didn't have what I knew they carried, right? Now they have some special in and out deals that you can tell are on the end of the aisle, but up and down the steel racks, you're pretty much gonna know that these are the five items that will be there every week. But that's just because they're selling in bulk, et cetera. But so so I would say the vertical retailers and the club feel like the ones that are doing it the best now. But if you make those same people go now do a store with 150,000 items in it, I think they would struggle as well.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

Yeah. I think that's great. I think you're right on that and as you assess that. Okay, Michael, it's it's just always great to talk with you. I uh I find this fascinating. Anything you would like else to leave with our viewers today? Any thoughts, additional thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 37:25

Um, first off, thanks for the opportunity. Oh um, you you called me out of the blue after I wrote that, wrote the and and literally I wrote a very quick LinkedIn quote when I was sitting in a hotel or NRF saying these are kind of my top thoughts, et cetera. And a lot of kudos to Matt Pfeiffer for cleaning it up and making it look like an article, which she has an amazing ability to do that, or AI does, one or the other. I'm not sure it watched. Um, but I think the key, the key takeaway is you get what you measure. It you better measure the right stuff. It better be leading to what you want, be very, very focused on the end of the day, that customer and are we meeting their needs or not? And that's hard, a hard thing to measure. And how well customer satisfaction has always been a hard thing to measure. Because I gotta tell you, on a scale of one to five, tell me how happy you are. That's not getting that's not getting it done. I appreciate that as a way, but again, doing the research to go when you walked in here, what did you like about that experience? And what did you not like about that experience? Where did we disappoint you? Were you looking for anything you couldn't find? Collecting that kind of data and really getting your associates, in my opinion, to focus the custom focus on the customers. But you know what, Andy? That may mean this is a little bit controversial, that may mean you have people on the sales floor that are very good at doing tasks, but not good at relating and talking to people. Maybe you need to give them a different role within the store. Because the role inside the store, if you have a associate vest on and you're a focus on the customer, should be I see a customer, it looks like they need help. Can I go up and ask them if I can help them? Are you having a good day? What should you know, anything you're looking for, you can't find, anything I can help you with? That doesn't happen. And that's disappointing.

SPEAKER_00 39:20

Okay. One one other question. Sure. And then we'll wrap it up. Because I can keep just asking you questions for a long time now. Uh and you have you have such a great retail mind. But um if you think about the future, AI and all the impact of AI and how this is changing everything. And uh I just came out of a leadership conference about that a few hours ago. And we had experts sitting in the room talking about this, and uh so from different AI companies, including Google and others. So as you think about the future of retail, okay, where's it going? Where where's retail going? Yeah.

Selling By Questions, Not Scripts

SPEAKER_01 40:06

I I think from my perspective, um AI and different technology are going to substantially change the work that happens in retail today. Okay. Um I can think of days where we literally gave a associate a device like that and they had to scan every label and every product for a 72-foot run to figure out if everything was on the shelf and was it in the right spot and was the price correct, et cetera. Very merry manual kind of thing. Now there are shelf scanning robots that can autonomously unplug at three o'clock in the morning and go down there and take those pictures. So when the associate comes in and goes, here's the four things that you need to take care of. We've already collected the data, just fix these four things. That's AI. That's a method of AI which says, I don't have to go collect the data, I just have to take action against things. And by the way, I hate to say this, but not every out of stock is equal. Okay. Milk, 2% milk not being in versus some specific fishing hour, the milk better be there, right? So you got to prioritize where you want to be out of stock and focus against that. But to me, what doesn't change is that people interaction. I don't see us replacing our associates with robots because robots can't interact and robots don't have arms. They can't stock product. Maybe they can one day. I don't know. But for right now, let's use the technology, let's use the tools in my workshop to do what they do because I can cut a board with a handsaw. It's a whole lot faster to use a power tool. We can give them RFID, we can give them robots, we can give them all those tools. That doesn't negate the fact that their role changes, but it's still taking care of the customer at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

And I think that's what I think that's a priority that I've gathered from our conversation is that we have a we're gonna we have great technology, AI, we're gonna do so many things. But I think the I think what you're giving us here is that don't forget the customer. So so don't don't take all these jobs. I mean, the jobs are gonna change. Most every job is gonna change. Every but but but yet we've got to make sure that we don't forget about the customer. Yeah. And and support and take some of that additional time to help the customer, support the customer. That's what I heard today.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

Yeah, absolutely. And I think way AI plays out, there's millions of dollars of research when I was at PNG about things like laundry detergent. So, Andy, let me ask you a question. Do you ever buy laundry detergent? Yes. Okay. When you go in to buy laundry detergent, you're you just turned down the laundry detergent out. What's the first thing that you're looking for? Price. Oh, in stock, number one. Well, why don't we say so so well you said price. Yeah. So you scan down that 72 foot, are you looking for the lowest price? No. Okay, what are you looking for? I'm looking for a quality brand at a good price. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 43:05

Define, let's call it out. What's a quality brand to you? Well, uh, you know, it's one that PG makes. Of course it is. Of course it is well, it is, you know, because of the the marketing and the quality. And so Todd. I look at Todd. I look at Todd.

SPEAKER_01 43:19

Okay, now the second question Are you a powder tide user? Are you a liquid tide user, or are you a pod user? I am still a liquid. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 43:31

Fine. Um, what scent do you like? Oh, something that doesn't have all this artificial stuff in it. Love it. Love it. Last question. I'm not surprised you flipped this already.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Last last question. Do you want it with oxygen or without oxygen? With oxy. Okay. Because I'm a stock list. I sweat a lot. Love it. So stop right here. That skew is out of stock. Now, what do you do?

SPEAKER_00 44:00

I I've got to make a decision to move. So where would you move? I'm gonna I'm gonna look at the competition to see have a similar product. Well we've got another tide there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

We just don't have the oxy liquid one. I take that. So we have the powder or we have the liquid without oxy.

SPEAKER_00 44:15

Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna go to the next best thing. So we're gonna gain? No. I'm gonna go, well, maybe no, I'll probably go with tide. Sorry. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 44:26

No, it's okay. So I'm staying with tide and I'm staying with liquid. Yeah. And I'll buy a substitute. Right. Are you happy about the fact they didn't have your stuff? No. But are you okay with that? Yes. Okay. We've just gone through something called the consumer decision tree. Every single consumer goes through that process. Yeah. And I'll guarantee you the home merchant, home office merchants understand this very well, but the people stocking stores have no idea. So educating, I'll give you an example. Um, it and we're going way too long, but I'm going to show you this.

SPEAKER_00 44:57

Yeah, this is good.

Closing Thanks And Where To Find Michael

SPEAKER_01 44:58

So I was in a store uh about five years ago, and it was right around the holidays, and they all had this go spend time in a store and help where you can, right? So I went in store 359 in a mall, the mall store button in Fayetteville, and talked to the store manager. Yeah, we need you in electronics. Okay, I want an electronics. And I said, What can I do to help? Well, we got all these spider wraps that are all tangled up, untangle them all. So I spent the entire morning untangling spider wraps. Not a lot of fun, but you know, I'm helping, right? And then right at lunch, the uh store manager comes and say, Hey Mike. He goes, What? Do you have a TV? I go, Yeah, I have TV. Why? He goes, here, and he throws me a shirt. And the shirt says TV expert. Sell some TVs. I said, Okay. I said, I run audio visual for my church. I understand refresh rate and plaza versus LED. It's like I got I got this. So I went up to four customers before my I went to lunch, Andy. I said, Can I help you? No, I'm just looking. Okay. Can I help you? No, I'm just looking. Okay. I was very nice. I was right here. Okay. So I went to lunch and go, that was discouraging. And I said, I'm gonna change my approach. So come back from lunch, I go, hey, Mr. Wilson, can I help you? I'm just looking. I go, oh, okay. What what room are you looking for? What what exactly are you? Well, I'd like to put a TV in my bedroom. Okay, so you probably don't want this one this big. You probably want a small, yeah, I want one like this. Okay, great. Well, how important is the quality of the view of the sp of the screen? Uh it's pretty important. Okay, what's the price? So I walked down three or four things. The bottom line is I sold six TVs that afternoon. Six. Six. Now, that's what somebody who's helping a customer focused does. And again, I'm not saying I was the best at it because I wasn't, but just ignoring customers, they're coming in to buy stuff if you can walk them through. I think the company does this, frankly, the best is Best Buy. They have a bunch of kids there, and they're usually kids who understand technology and they know how to get this, this, and this to all work together. I would agree with that. And so, how do you create? And I'm not a big best fan for other reasons, but for the most part, they do a really good job in store. Why can't we create that environment inside of a retail store like a Walmart store? Why can't we have people who are working in Department 13 really understand what drives laundry detergent sales and not just that's a that's a stock and that's not. So I'll be quiet because I'll go 20 more minutes on this. But this is the this is the kind of thing that I think people, yeah, the internet's great and AI is great, but at the end of the day, we've got to have the right people. At the end of the day, people are looking for people to make decisions.

SPEAKER_00 47:42

Well, you're right. It is a people business. It is. It is. Michael Grain, it's always a pleasure to have you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's this. Thank you again for our conversation today. Um, I want you to come back. You're always welcome doing business in Bitonville. To all of our viewers, thank you. I'm glad you got to got to spend some time with Michael now today. And uh, we'll try to get him back really soon in his next project. I'll keep watching his LinkedIn. Check him out on LinkedIn, by the way. Michael, thank you again. And thank you all of you for um watching and listening. We really appreciate you. Have a wonderful day, everyone. Goodbye. All right, bye-bye.