Livestream shopping is one of the most-watched emerging commerce categories heading into 2022. China's market dwarfs the U.S. but the gap is closing. Amazon Live, Facebook, TikTok, Walmart, YouTube, and the specialty platforms. What works and what doesn't.
A retrospective on the 2021 holiday retail playbook — what stuck (BOPIS, contactless, curated discovery) and what reverted as the pandemic context eased.
Sears was founded in 1893 and became the largest U.S. retailer by 1969 — generating over 1% of U.S. GDP. The 2005 Kmart merger under Eddie Lampert was the inflection. The October 2018 Chapter 11 ended Sears Holdings. By 2026: under 10 U.S. stores. The canonical 133-year American retail collapse case.
Google has been expanding its commerce partnerships with major U.S. retailers, and Home Depot has emerged as one of the more consequential partner relationships. The expanded integration reflects broader shifts in how consumers research and purchase home improvement products. The implications for the broader home improvement retail category are real.
Main Street retail has been shrinking for fifteen years. What's left: food, services, and experiential retail. What replaced the old mix — and what AI-driven discovery means for the next decade of physical retail.
Barnes & Noble was supposed to be dead by 2015. Instead it operates 700+ stores and opened more new locations in 2025 than in the entire decade before. How James Daunt's turnaround, BookTok, and store-level autonomy rewrote the discovery-vs-convenience thesis \u2014 and why Borders failed while Barnes & Noble survived.
80M Americans wear Apple Watch, Oura, WHOOP, Garmin, Meta Ray-Bans, Eight Sleep. The data layer that decides retail. Citation Share is the new metric.
Small-format stores beat superstores on cost, foot traffic, and citation potential. Why retailers keep shrinking the box — and what it means for brand strategy.
2011 Anthem Marketing study: sub-$15 items were cheaper in stores; $50-plus items were cheaper online. What the channel discrepancy revealed — and what Amazon Prime, dynamic pricing, and AI engines did to erase it.
Walmart entered the casket business this month — quietly, online only, with twenty caskets priced between $999 and $3,200, roughly a third of comparable funeral home pricing. The FTC Funeral Rule of 1984 made it legal. Costco entered in 2004. Walmart's October launch is the larger, louder, more sustained challenge. What the broader funeral services category should be watching.