Two logistics stories broke this week that look unrelated. They’re not. They’re the same story, told from different sides of the supply chain.

Side one: DJT6, Riverside, California. Amazon’s largest U.S. facility went on strike this week. This is the first time both shifts have walked out together. Seems important.

Workers there organized with Teamsters Local 1932 in December, after a midnight walkout during peak holiday season. Here’s why: pay below industry standard, no healthcare, injuries management wouldn’t address, and threats against workers who took time off to recover from those injuries. I mean, dystopian. DJT6 was the fifth Amazon facility in Southern California to organize with the Teamsters.

Nearly 10,000 Amazon workers nationwide are now seeking recognition.

Side note: from what I could find, there is no deeper meaning to the warehouse number DJT6. If anyone knows more, please comment.

This week’s strike has a real person behind it — Andres Aguayo. He was fired this spring after raising safety concerns and talking to coworkers about their rights. Amazon gave him no documented reason for the firing, and it hasn’t disputed that. The company didn’t respond to reporters’ requests for comment either.

“They figured I was enough of a problem that they didn’t want me working,” Aguayo told KVCR. “They claim to have found some sort of misconduct without any evidence.”

A coworker described him as someone who “would help a lot around the building.” He wasn’t an outside organizer. He was a guy who helped people on their shifts. The union is calling the firing illegal retaliation. The strike this week is about unfair labor practices.

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Side two: UPS, cutting 30,000 jobs in 2026 … 48,000 were cut in 2025.

Here’s how this all connects. UPS’s CFO points to Amazon’s build-out of its own delivery network. Amazon delivered 6.3 billion U.S. packages in 2024, more than UPS or FedEx.

Two things are happening at once. Amazon’s packages are leaving UPS’s trucks, so UPS is chasing higher-margin freight like healthcare logistics instead of bulk e-commerce. And whatever volume UPS keeps will equate to fewer hours for employees. The business UPS has with Amazon is shrinking, and more of what’s left will run through automated facilities instead of people.

“We plan to reduce total operational hours by approximately 25 million hours [in 2026].” — UPS CFO

Drivers are the target. UPS offered every driver an uncapped buyout without bargaining it with the union first. The Teamsters sued in February for breach of contract. UPS pulled the buyout offer from 13 states in March, and the two sides settled in April. The settlement is capped at 7,500 drivers, $150,000 each. No other severance program is allowed before the contract expires in 2028. It was negotiated, not forced. Still, up to 7,500 careers ending on a timeline nobody driving trucks had a vote in.

Same union, two fights, one week.

Teamsters Local 1932 is trying to win DJT6 workers the protections UPS drivers already had. Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien is also negotiating how many of those UPS drivers get bought out. Amazon now needs fewer of them. One local is fighting to get a seat at the table. Another local’s members are getting paid to leave it. Amazon doesn’t have to break labor laws to hollow out a delivery relationship.

What that costs the floor

As a store leader, your delivery driver is your linchpin in running a successful store. You quickly develop a shorthand with this person. They understand your layout. How the dock is set up. They know where to find you on the floor quickly. If a box is cracked, they’ll point it out. They turn all the boxes the same direction so you can scan all the barcodes in like lightning.

You don’t spend a lot of time with them, but the 15 minutes you do can make your day. If you have a new driver every week, it will slow you down. A lot.

The people with a corner office and a desk don’t care about these micro-relationships or how they speed up business. But issues will arise. Pretty soon, the new driver on the route won’t know your dock has a blind corner, and the damaged pallet that gets signed for is now your problem.

Amazon calls this network ownership. Sure. On the floor, it’s a relationship that took years to build. Now, it’s gone. Every day you will now spend precious minutes directing and explaining to a new person what you could’ve told your regular driver, Mario, with a head nod.

But, hey, Amazon needs to make more money, right?

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Kit Campoy spent 25 years on the floor leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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It’s been a turbulent summer. We have twelve issues to prove it.

Do other people cover retail? Yes. But nobody covers it like this. I cover it from the floor up with zero corporate dollars. It’s what I do every week. Here’s the summer recap.

I didn’t catch retail doing wild stuff this summer — retail told on itself. It said it publicly in its own press releases and numbers. It confessed to everything. I just collected the confessions.

The summer archive isn’t twelve different stories. It’s one story, told twelve ways.

Retail admits it has a problem, but it’s small. No big deal. It’s going to fix it, and the customer experience will be better because of it. Then, underneath it all, the frontline teams pay the price.

Here we go.

AI got added to the job. Nobody adjusted the pay.

In June I wrote that retail chose AI over workers. But it was a bad decision, and now it’s paying for it.

By August, Walmart employees were spending their shifts correcting the mistakes their AI tools were supposed to eliminate. For no additional pay.

The algorithmic pricing cheat sheet I wrote about sits in the driver’s seat here. Surge, dynamic, surveillance — three names, three different ways to charge you more.

These were written across the summer. Similar insight. The technology arrived, the headcount didn’t move, and neither did the wage. Then you got charged more.

Corporate moves fast and breaks things. The frontline cleans it up.

Walmart swore its new pricing patents had nothing to do with the digital price tags rolling out in every store. This one hit, and I know why. The cost of everything is surging. People are pissed.

Target brought back Isaac Mizrahi and called it a turnaround. It didn’t bring back its customers. (Now, they’re in the doghouse again for a racist-ass Halloween costume.) But yeah, Target keeps tripping — hard.

My article about excellent customer service argues that you can train people to greet all you want. It doesn’t cover a floor that’s short two people, and it doesn’t hold up when associates are working two jobs because one isn’t enough. Pay people more.

Retail cut jobs. It also cut third spaces.

Downtown Dallas lost its Neiman Marcus in July. A historic location — gone.

Sephora’s “quiet hours” turned out to last exactly two hours a week, which tells you how seriously that accommodation was ever meant.

And the piece I keep thinking about, the bowling alleys and diners we traded for kiosks, is really about what happens to a town when every place that used to hold people gets replaced by a screen that rushes you out the door.

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One more thing about surveillance … and Congress is helping.

The Senate’s “shoplifting” bill would turn your local retail store into a government surveillance center. This is worth its own section, because it’s the one piece this summer where the threat comes from Congress instead of corporate — the people tasked with watching corporate are slated to approve the harm.

This bill hasn’t passed yet. Call your senator.

The one I’d ask you to read twice.

I wrote this one from the inside. Twenty-five years on a floor teaches you exactly how little “we couldn’t have done it without you” is worth when it isn’t followed by a check. This article is the receipt for everything I write.

A summer thesis backed up by retail’s own confessions.

Back in June I began with this: retail sold itself out, and nobody’s buying the comeback. Every piece since has been the evidence. This article is one of my top performing of all time.

We all know retail because we all shop. We’ve all seen it get progressively worse. I write about why and what would actually make it better. Told from the floor up.

Enjoy August as the summer winds down, and I’ll see you next week.

— Kit

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Kit Campoy spent 25 years on the floor leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

As a seasoned retail leader, I spent a lot of time with new tech in stores. I was at the forefront of many pilot programs. The good ones had a feedback loop built in, and a savvy store manager at the helm. I’d talk to the corporate side often. I was good at it. I could see what would be a problem, bog us down, or get in the way early. I also listened to my team’s feedback and pushed it up.

We helped make sure the tech was ready before the company rolled it out to all stores. After reading about Walmart this week, it seems like tech pilot programs are no more. They’re putting their new AI in the hands of everyone. They’re building the plane while flying it. They’re asking an hourly associate to help shape their AI, on top of their regular job, for no extra pay.

Walmart and Target are the subjects of my articles more than I’d like. Amazon, too. They’re huge and they’re usually making decisions that are bad for their employees. Or bad for customers. Or are so ridiculous that I cannot help myself but torch them. These companies come up in retail news so often that I usually try to avoid their stories. I like to mix it up. But this week, it was unavoidable.

Here we are again: Walmart.

Oh, Walmart and their AI. Walmart has invested heavily in AI. Not all of it is bad. Some of it is genuinely helpful and saves time. They’ve also given employees the opportunity to learn different AI systems and help develop time-saving programs. Great!

But this AI article is about the people on the floor, of course. Because the people with their feet planted on a store floor using AI have some problems with it. The AI is not making their jobs smoother. It’s getting in the way, telling them they’re not fast enough, and encouraging them to cut corners.

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“We’re expected to meet impossible timelines,” said Ava Williams, an overnight stocker in Spokane, Washington.

Williams said AI-directed workflows recommend cutting corners to keep pace. Walmart requires employees to check for expired products and sanitize shelves, but the AI they use is like, “nah, girl. Just skip that. Go faster.”

A fulfillment employee, that’s usually someone who fulfills online orders, said he “ignores” the safety-monitoring AI. This is AI that flags hazards by way of the store’s cameras and sensors. He ignores them because they are so often wrong. Also, they’re messing up his flow. His speed. Which is, of course, tracked.

So Walmart put new technology in the hands of its hourly associates and was like, “do your best. Ignore all those alerts. Let us know how it goes.” Seems weird. Doesn’t seem like a plan that would support your people in doing their best work. There’s another thing.

The AI is seriously stressing frontline employees out.

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United for Respect, a nonprofit that seeks to “build an economy where corporations respect working people,” sought transparency on how AI-driven tools affect employee safety and working conditions. They requested a report on Walmart’s pay, metrics, training, and workforce fairness.

Walmart shareholders rejected the measure. By a lot. The proposal was voted down 95-5. Not surprising. When mega-corps say, “Technology should serve people by elevating human capability, improving the customer experience, and making work more meaningful,” I know that bullshit from a mile away. That’s PR-speak delivered by a person who has never worked for an hourly wage.

So, we have this full AI rollout. Hourly employees are doing all this invisible labor to make it all work. They’re getting stressed AF. Then, a workers’ rights nonprofit is asking for accountability. A mega-corp is blocking that and providing a word salad statement about technology serving people.

Retailers want AI to streamline work at the store level. Someday it could. But right now, associates are doing their jobs, managing a new technology, developing workarounds, and sweating their asses off for $17.70/hr. That’s the national average. That’s $35,400 a year. In this economy? Are you serious?

Let’s stop categorizing this work as low-skill. It clearly is not. Frontline associates have more knowledge about the store than most of the C-suite. It’s time to pay them like it. Oh, and if you want them beta-testing your AI — pay them double.

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If you work retail and have a story like this (AI or not), I want to hear it. I only publish with your permission. I will protect your anonymity. Message me on Substack or email me at kit@kitcampoy.com.

Kit Campoy spent 25 years on the floor leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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No wonder we’re all depressed. Look at the evolution of McDonald’s (see below). Now, I’m a Gen X-er. I remember what McDonald’s used to be like. I remember Micky D’s in the ‘80s. I remember the hot plastic. The metal jungle gyms that burned your hands in the Arizona summer — they finally moved them indoors.

Our parents would throw some nuggets at us and let us run around until we fell on our faces. We’d meet other random kids. Scream. Have meltdowns. Get back up. Our parents would shrug, meet other random parents, and smoke cigarettes in the parking lots.

“No hitting, Jimmy!” they’d yell from their bench. Then they’d resume their adult conversations, relatively unbothered.

No one thought much about it, but now that kind of feels like another planet.

A couple of things snatched my attention over the past week.
The first one was this McDonald’s evolution graphic. It’s so grim. So gray. So beige. There is literally nothing memorable; there’s no reason to stay. Maybe that’s what they want. Put your order in at this screen. Pick up your food over there. Get out, loser.

The other moment that I can’t stop thinking about is a TikTok video. A guy describes his interaction with a cashier at a coffee shop. The customer leads the whole interaction while the employee stares at him.

Customer: “Hey, good morning.”
Employee: stare.
”Could I please have a medium iced vanilla latte?”
Stare. “What size?”
”Yeah! Medium, please.”
Stare. “Hot or iced?”
”Um, ok. Yes, iced, please.”
Stare.

Then the cashier doesn’t quite know how to get through the prompts at the register. Then, of course, the screen prompts the customer to tip.

I know we’ve all experienced some version of this. We’re all paying more for a worse experience — across the board. Everywhere. There are a million reasons for this right now, but what I’m interested in today is the loss of third spaces.

Third spaces are disappearing

Last week, Fortune reported that attendance at bars, bowling alleys, and movie theaters is at an all-time low. Also, food chains are ripping out tables and seating areas so they can stage more mobile pickup areas.

Third spaces are disappearing. It’s bad for our health. Chronic loneliness can carry the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

All the regular places we visit are removing places to linger. That removes human interaction. It increases loneliness. It leads to awkward cashiers. Sorry, cashiers. I know some of you think smiling and being nice to strangers is cringe, but it’s also weird when you blankly stare at us.

Third spaces are important. I work from home, but I often need to get out. After spending 25 years on a retail floor, I need to be around people. Sometimes I’ll head to my neighborhood coffee shop to hang out and work. It’s a local place, and they actually encourage people to stay.

I’ve met neighbors there. I know the baristas by name now. It builds community and a sense of belonging. They know my name, and they know my usual drink. Some people might call this friction; I call it necessary for a happy life.

“Friction creates serendipity.” — Kevin Ervin Kelley, architect of public spaces and author of the book Irreplaceable.

I hosted a book club last month. We read Irreplaceable, and Kelley came to talk to the group. That quote is from our talk. It’s what most companies miss when they try to optimize everything for mobile pickup.

Mobile orders and drive-thru business models have their place. But they should not be our only option. Serendipity is vital to the human experience. Know how I met my husband? Serendipity. Know how Kelley met his wife? Same. An unexpected run-in at an unusual place. A casual comment that sparks something in someone else.

An a-ha! Yes! A let’s-keep-talking kind of moment that you don’t get from someone on a screen. It’s body language, facial expressions, and watching how the other person treats a stranger. As a human society, these moments are necessary.

And they’re slipping away.

See you in the desert

If you run a business, one that is open to the public, don’t forget that. Not everything needs to be optimized. Not every customer wants to order at a screen. Sometimes the easiest route is to tell a human what you want. Well, unless you’re ordering from that coffee shop guy — you know what I mean.

Companies are optimizing their way out of a functioning society. Kiosks have replaced humans, and the whole experience is worse. (Yes, I know some of you like self-checkout; I understand. But this is bigger.)

We can do everything from a phone now: order groceries, lunch, pet food, watch videos, and attend class. But that doesn’t mean it will lead to happiness. Friction-free isn’t always the best for your health.

Growing up Gen. X meant meeting up after school in fast food restaurants. We found each other in parking lots on Saturday nights. We threw desert parties. Someone drew a map on notebook paper, someone brought the beer, and we told our parents we were going to play mini-golf. We got creative, we met random people, and we let the weekend unfold in weird and interesting ways.

Serendipity, friends. We have the chance now to not let it slip away. Let’s chase that.

See you in the desert.

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Kit Campoy spent 25 years on the floor leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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Surveillance pricing.

Maryland banned it in April. Connecticut banned it in June. New York’s One Fair Price Act cleared the legislature and is sitting on Governor Hochul’s desk right now. California has a bill moving, too.

More than 40 bills are active in at least 24 states. Algorithmic pricing isn’t new, but surveillance pricing is. And it’s bad.
Let me tell you why these 24 states are running like a greyhound on an open stretch of road.

States are racing to ban a pricing model most shoppers don’t even know exists yet. I’ll tell you how it works. The price on your screen isn’t the price on the next person’s screen. Retailers are building prices around what they know about you personally, not around what that item is worth.

Companies want to know what it’s worth to you.

They’re calling it personalization. It’s actually a system built to find the maximum amount — you specifically — will pay.

I changed prices by hand for 20 years

Every week, I did markdowns, price changes, and promo changes myself. I printed out packs of markdown lists so thick you could barely staple them together. I pulled styles off racks, threw them on rolling racks, and loaded plastic markdown guns with yellow or red stickers.

I spent about ten minutes every hour unjamming that gun. It took hours. Sometimes it took an entire eight-hour shift. By the end of the day, stickers and glue residue covered the bottom half of my T-shirt. But all that effort meant the price on the shelf stayed the same for the next person who walked by five minutes later.

That’s slipping away.

Electronic shelf labels are digital price tags that replace paper stickers. They allow retailers to change prices in seconds. This means no more sending someone down the aisle with a price gun. I’ve written before about the patents Walmart holds on this technology.

The patent describes what the system is capable of, not what the company is actually doing with it. So, understand that. But the hardware exists, the technology is spreading, and it’s the delivery mechanism for something bigger than faster price changes.

Three pricing terms that mean different things

Surge pricing is the one we’re familiar with. When demand spikes, so do prices. It’s why airline tickets cost more the week before Christmas. It’s why Lyft prices skyrocket when a concert lets out. Hotels do this, too. It’s annoying, but we’ve accepted it. We try to skate around it as best we can, but we’re also just like, it is what it is.

Dynamic pricing is the category that surge pricing sits inside. Prices move with market conditions, up or down, the way airlines have priced seats for decades. Dynamic prices will also change based on competitor tracking, inventory levels, time of day, and seasonal trends. Prices in this category will also fall based on seasons. If something is off-peak, companies will often discount it.

Think of dynamic pricing like a kangaroo. Surge pricing is the kangaroo’s baby sitting in her pouch. They’re nestled. They’re close. They’re not the same thing.

Surveillance pricing is the one moving through statehouses right now. It’s a price built from your loyalty app, your purchase history, and your location. This is not the company’s price. It’s your price.

Here’s what this looks like.

If the price is the same for everyone standing at the shelf right now, it’s dynamic or surge. I’m talking digital price tags. A small, local market with a paper tag isn't running dynamic pricing just because prices go up when costs do; that's every store, always.

Dynamic pricing means software is re-pricing automatically, in real time, off demand signals. The paper tag can't do that. The price stays put until someone changes it by hand.

If the price is different because of what the retailer knows about you, it’s surveillance pricing. You have no way to catch it happening. You would need to be standing next to another shopper comparing screens to even know.

The receipt won’t tell you this happened

There’s a labor cost buried in here too.

Every label that updates itself is a task that used to belong to a person on the floor. UFCW built its Affordable Groceries and Good Jobs campaign around exactly that. Fewer tags to change by hand mean fewer scheduled hours for the person who used to change them. I know what that job looked like. I did it every week.

Here’s where the state bans currently stand.

• Maryland’s law covers large food retailers and delivery services,
  effective October 1.

• Connecticut’s is broader — retail sellers generally, not just food.

• New York has required algorithmic pricing disclosure since November. The newer bill on Hochul’s desk would ban surveillance pricing outright.

• California’s AB 2564 would do the same.

Note: dynamic, surge, and surveillance pricing all fall under “algorithmic pricing.”

What do you do with this information?

Ask a manager whether your store has switched to digital shelf labels. Log out of the store’s app before price-checking anything. When you’re logged in, personalized pricing can run and identify you. If the price on your phone doesn’t match the price on the shelf for the same item, screenshot both and keep the receipt. That’s the documentation lawmakers are asking for as they build these cases. Then, tell a friend.

Now you know.

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Kit Campoy spent 25 years on the floor leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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Here’s another read that will make you want to throw your phone.

On the subject of algorithmic pricing. Amazon got in big trouble for Project Nessie.

How private equity ruins everything. Including your favorite stores.

I predicted the exodus at the end of this piece. I knew it was coming because I was living it — and retail turnover spiked right on schedule through 2022. It didn’t fix anything.

Five years later, this piece still holds up, and that’s the problem.

Corporate called it a hiring crisis when it was actually a compensation crisis. Retail leaders are still expected to run stores like career professionals and get paid like they’re doing a summer job.

Here’s what I wrote back then, unedited.

There it was on the break table, propped open: a large, colorful cardboard box. Small, snack-size baggies were strewn about.

I walked past it a dozen times before I bothered to ask what it was. Finally, another manager told me, “That’s our thank-you gift for navigating the pandemic last year.” I thought he was kidding. Is this a joke? Unfortunately, this was no joke.

Shock doesn’t really begin to describe the feeling. I was stunned and disheartened but not completely surprised. I felt taken advantage of and forgotten. Expendable. We didn’t get raises in 2020, so I was hoping corporate was coming up with some great plan to compensate us.

We did just help save the company from total collapse.

We had received terrible holiday gifts in the past, but I thought that managing a team through a worldwide pandemic might elicit a more elevated gift.

Money was what I was thinking; I wanted money.

2020 was a wrecking ball, as we all know. We had to close our store for two months and furlough staff. I still came in with two other managers four days a week to process online orders.

We were dedicated. We were scared, but we would do whatever we could do to help our company survive this global tragedy. We wanted jobs to come back to for ourselves and for our entire teams. We worked hard every day, knowing that all those people furloughed who couldn’t come in would do it for us.

As things began to open, we shifted all priorities to cleaning and safety. When I say we cleaned everything all the time, that’s not an exaggeration. We cleaned the counters and the fitting rooms AFTER EVERY CUSTOMER.

Our knuckles bled; they were so dry and cracked. Our management desk became one giant collection of essential oils and hand salves.

We enforced mask mandates and kept customers behind plexiglass shields. We limited occupancy. We taped new OSHA information to the windows weekly. My teenage associates were more mature than most adults about the whole thing. “Can you stand behind the plexiglass for me? Thank you,” I heard all day long. “Let me just clean my counter before you set your things down.”

Most customers were appreciative. Some weren’t. Someone yelled at us for not providing hand sanitizer before we closed in March 2020. You couldn’t buy that stuff anywhere back then, but nevertheless, we didn’t have any, and that was our fault. Shame on us. We were the worst.

People were stressed, and they took it out on us regularly.

The vaccine came as did more mutated variants. Corporate staff were brought back on but kept at home to protect them. Us frontline workers got shorter mall hours and weekly trips to Walmart because the company couldn’t send us enough paper towels.

“Just make a supply run,” they would tell us.

We were exhausted from the stress, the worry, and the customer interaction. As leaders, we had to listen to staff worries and comfort them, as well as manage our own lives and fears.

I quit working out. I drank more than I normally did. I ate bread and downed a lot of coffee. I took extra breaks. I doom-scrolled. I survived. I projected confidence and maintained calm. I was the leader that everyone needed. I took no shit from customers.

I was awarded a box of snacks that was meant to be shared with the whole team. I left it on the table.

No gift at all would’ve been better than this.

The company prides itself on culture. That’s been their excuse to pay us less all these years — the culture is really cool! Sure, it was, but it’s now non-existent. We don’t have meetings. We can’t get together. Zoom fatigue has set in, and all the virtual meetings we have are pretty much pointless.

Money is doled out to shareholders while we wipe down counters as our knuckles bleed. Then we’re told we’re not getting a raise.

Enjoy your chips!

The CFO raves about how great the company is doing; we’re saving massive amounts of payroll because we can’t hire staff — no one is applying, and then I’m told I’m only getting a 3% raise even though my review ratings are through the roof. It doesn’t add up. Inflation is currently 6.5% by last estimates, so at this point, I’m just losing money.

My commute is far. The job is physically demanding. Leadership training is non-existent at this point. We staff 50, mostly teen associates. This is typically their first job. There is a lot they don’t know. This is great, but it is also an added challenge for store leaders.

The work that we do is essential. Yes, we sell a product, but we are a neighborhood store. Friends run into each other almost daily. Kids run into teachers, and teenagers squeal when they bump into friends they haven’t seen in months. We make this environment happen. The leaders do, not the company.

Not to mention, we are training the next generation of workers. We are training people from scratch. We are teaching people how to behave at a job, period. They know nothing. We’re teaching them etiquette and work ethic.

The leaders of buildings do this, not the company.

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2022 is about to be a rude awakening. People aren’t going to keep doing this. Retail is hard, physical work and we get terrible raises. We are leaders who have to act as referees, cheerleaders, older siblings, counselors, confidants, and protectors. We have to switch gears constantly. We change direction on a dime. We’re good at it too.

Now we’re just tired and we’d like more money. Give us raises. Good ones. Make us want to stay. I didn’t get one in 2020, so I’m missing out on a whole year. I didn’t forget that.

Companies need to take a long, hard look at their values. I’m done being understanding about this whole thing. For years we’ve been told that we can’t have this and we can’t have that, and by the way, cut ten hours of payroll every week. We’re trying to save money.

For what?

We are leaders of large teams; we are merchants. We are career professionals and we just helped guide the stores through a global trauma that we haven’t quite sorted out yet and that no one will ever forget. We’re still dealing with the psychological effects; you can’t pay us in Doritos. That doesn’t quite cover my bills, in fact.

There is about to be a mass exodus.

I know you think you’ve seen it already, but just wait until next year. People are demanding better and leaving if they don’t get it. Companies need to show us they care and give their store leadership teams raises. They also need to give people with tenure more money and reward loyalty.

Quit throwing chips at us and hoping we’ll be satisfied.

We are career professionals, not seventeen-year-old boys. If you want us to stay and continue to work as hard as we have for the past two years, you can show us your appreciation in the form of more money in our bank accounts. Or you can come down here and ring this person up because we will be gone.

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Kit Campoy spent 25 years on the floor leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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“The music in here isn’t loud enough!” she exclaimed. “We want it to feel like a party in here!” My VP of visual merchandising was in for a visit.

It was 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. Didn’t matter. Party time!

She walked behind the register, found the volume knob, and cranked it up. Then she grabbed a Sharpie and dashed a line on the knob. That way, everyone would know what volume was the appropriate volume. I guess our ears were different from corporate ears.

I stared at her. I nodded slightly, and knew that I would never follow her direction.

But this is retail in most places. The managers at the corporate office know best. Even though they spend about two hours a year in your store. You’re there forty hours a week — at least. You know that the people who shop in the morning are grandparents and moms on a mission. They want a conversation with a knowledgeable human they can hear.

But no. I guess it’s party time!

I’m sure my morning customers didn’t want to hear my voice anyway. They wanted trendy music blasted at them so they had to lean in and listen hard. I had to yell. But this is fun, right?

Party!

Sephora recently announced it would be hosting “Quiet Hours” for shoppers. The store will lower the lights and the music “to better suit the needs of neurodiverse shoppers.” I mean, yes, and how about you let your store leaders have some autonomy?

I knew every inch of my store. I knew the customers. I understood the traffic patterns. We kept the music at a pleasant level (lower) for the morning shoppers and gradually increased the volume over the course of the day.

By 3:00 pm, the high schoolers came rolling through. We inched the music up. After dinner, it went up again — just a little. Families would stroll through after dinner. The parents had drunk their wine or had a margarita at the Mexican restaurant next door. Louder music was tolerated.

Every single second of the day doesn’t need to be a corporate mandate. But it is.

Two hours

Sephora’s current Quiet Hours are for the first hour after opening on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Wow. Revolutionary.

The part of this that really kills me is the time spent on it.

Executives had endless discussions about this. Ungodly amounts of data were collected and combed through. They stressed about it.
Should we? Shouldn’t we?
Then they decided to test it in some stores. There were memos and rollouts and more data and conference calls. District managers visited and talked and followed up.

Then the PR memo rolls out and the company announces that they’re rolling out Quiet Hours for — wait for it — two hours each week.

Excuse me if I’m not excited about this.

The Voice of the Frontline is read across 50 states and 71 countries weekly.

Trust store leaders

Is Sephora headed in the right direction? Yes. But all that work in research to announce a two-hour-per-week change is pitiful. Why not do it every day? The first hour you’re open, keep the volume down. Or maybe have a different playlist. Something more mellow or jazzy or whatever.

But, like, they’re announcing Quiet Hours like it’s a huge deal. It’s not.

If the people at corporate would listen to their store leaders more, they wouldn’t need to spend time and money on this. Look at Barnes and Noble. They let their store managers choose what books they should sell based on their location and neighborhoods. Read that again, because that is their whole business.

Know why you’re seeing more of those stores opening? Because it worked.

But sure, Sephora rolls out Quiet Hours. Target announces they’re having their associates greet customers. Whatever.

Just talk to the store leaders. They’ll tell you what customers really want. Then we can skip all this running around, data collection, and PR announcements. Because creating a place where people want to be isn’t that hard. You just need to listen to what they want.

Party on, I guess.

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Kit Campoy spent 25 years on the floor leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

Refer a friend

This new article by Slate, Inside America’s Shoplifting Lab, had me furiously taking notes like a college kid in the ‘90s. I know retail. I understand shoplifting and loss prevention. It was a big chunk of my job for two decades. Still, this article schooled me.

I know how people steal. I know how companies try to stop them. But there’s more going on here.

Because it’s not just about preventing theft; it’s about data collection, and honestly, it’s giving me a headache. My level of dread just increased, and my level of fury kicked up a notch. Get your painkillers ready; you’re going to need them.

The shrink deception

Shrink is the retail industry’s term for loss.

In 2023, the National Retail Federation (NRF) told the country that “nearly half” of $94.5 billion in reported inventory losses were attributable to organized retail crime (ORC). It was a shocking number, and it moved fast through statehouses and newsrooms.

Then Retail Dive investigated. That sent NRF pacing. They had to retract that number. The “nearly half” figure came from a two-year-old congressional testimony by an industry advocate. It did not come from the retailers’ own numbers. It contradicted the NRF’s own 2022 shrink survey, which reported that all external theft, organized or not, accounted for 37% of losses. (Retail Dive cited this, but NRF’s page is gone).

So, not 50%. 37%. Gee, that’s a big difference.

A year later, NRF decided to stop publishing its shrink survey for the first time in three decades. Hmmmm.

Its replacement report ran the Loss Prevention Research Council’s (LPRC) logo next to its own and changed its methodology. Well, that’s interesting. By the way, the LPRC is a highly influential retail security think-tank and research organization that boasts a membership of 190 leading retail companies representing more than 200,000 store locations in the U.S. alone.

So, this novel report that the NRF and the LPRC put together approached data collection in a new way. Instead of asking retailers for actual numbers, it asked “senior loss prevention and security executives” for impressions.

The NRF abandoned 30 years of real retail analysis, and asked for impressions instead of actual data. What are impressions, you ask? Basically vibes. We’re using vibes to pass laws. Cool.

That’s how you get a claimed 93% jump in shoplifting incidents and a 90% jump in dollar losses.

“The LPRC’s studies are funded by the shrink-reduction companies that profit from the panic. It is in their financial interest to make the number bigger.” — Rachel Shteir, author of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting, in Slate.

These inaccurate shrink percentages come from companies that profit from panic. Congress used these numbers to justify CORCA.

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What S.1404 (CORCA) actually proposes

The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) passed the House on May 12, 2026. It makes serial retail theft a federal offense and lets prosecutors combine smaller thefts tied to the same network into one $5,000-plus case. That part is defensible. I saw the same people steal a lot in my career. I knew them. They knew me. When they saw me on the floor, they’d leave.

But CORCA isn’t only about combining smaller thefts.

It sets up a new coordination center within DHS, under Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE. This center can collect personal data from shoppers accused, but not convicted, of theft.

Yes, CORCA gives authority to collect personal data from shoppers.

Retailers act as the collection point. This helps DHS avoid the constitutional limits that would apply if the government collected this data directly. (I’m screaming. Are you screaming?)

The bill allows facial recognition and automatic license plate readers for retail theft. It also lets agencies share this data when “operationally necessary.” That’s a phrase the bill never defines. There’s no requirement to tell you your data was collected, and no process for you to see it or challenge it.

You can sign a petition created on ResistBot here. They need 1,000 signatures. They aren’t even close.

Am I hallucinating?

CORCA is now in the Senate as S.1404. It is currently cosponsored by 47 senators. That’s almost half. It has bipartisan support.

Do they not know what’s in it?

More than 120 civil rights and immigration organizations, including the Vera Institute, are urging Senate Democrats to reject it. They’re calling it a Trojan horse for expanding ICE’s domestic surveillance reach. I would say they’re not wrong.

That request is landing in a Senate where Democrats spent 76 days shutting down the government this year fighting a $70 billion ICE funding bill. A lot of these leaders are now cosponsoring a bill that hands the same agency a new way to amass our personal data.

Like, am I hallucinating?

We’re all subject to get funneled into this data pipeline, but what’s even more concerning is the people in need. People who are food insecure.

Food is one of the most stolen categories in retail, partly because it’s hard to tag, and partly because grocery prices skyrocketed and SNAP was cut.

What no one on a retail floor signed up for is becoming the intake point for a federal database that follows someone accused of stealing baby formula into an ICE file.

Remember, this is all based on a statistic that the NRF published and had to walk back. Because it came from a loss prevention industry advocate.

Look, people shouldn’t steal. I stood on retail floors for two decades. If people stole too much and I couldn’t stop it, my raises were affected. I also think you shouldn’t take things that aren’t yours.

But I also know why people do it.

Many people feel justified because of broken healthcare costs, wages that don’t cover rent, and corporations getting tax breaks while retail shrink funds a new industry of consultants selling the fix. Many people are also hungry — literally.

CORCA doesn’t resolve any of that. It just gives DHS a new way to add to its expanding files on all of us.

Now what?

This isn’t law yet. There’s no Senate vote scheduled yet. S.1404 is still sitting in the Judiciary Committee, and the likelier path isn’t a standalone floor vote. It will probably be folded into the NDAA, where it gets a fraction of the debate.

The NDAA is the National Defense Authorization Act. This is the annual bill that sets Pentagon policy and funding. Congress passes some version of it every year, which makes it one of the few bills guaranteed to become law on schedule.

See where I’m going?

That’s exactly why it’s a magnet for unrelated ride-along issues. Because it has to pass. Lawmakers often attach provisions that might not survive a standalone vote.

That means the window to act is now, before it’s attached to something bigger like the NDAA. Call your senators (not email) and ask where they stand on S.1404. If you’re represented by a cosponsor, and remember there are 47 now, that call carries extra weight. Public pressure is what flips a cosponsor. If your senator sits on the Judiciary Committee, that call can keep it from ever getting a committee vote.

There’s a lot to keep track of right now, I know. I write about retail news and frontline work. Data surveillance is now part of that. Take a deep breath. Stay hydrated. This isn’t law yet.

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Maximum effort: 🖤, share, comment, sign the petition, call your senators.

Together we can still keep CORCA from becoming law.

Kit Campoy spent 46,000 hours on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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Refer a friend

Saks Global, now Exemplar Luxury Group, filed a WARN notice June 11 with the Texas Workforce Commission. The language is loud if you know what you’re looking for.

The affected employees are “not represented by any union and do not have any bumping rights.”

That’s the company’s own language. They’re talking about what will happen to 67 retail employees at the downtown Dallas Neiman Marcus.

By the way, a WARN notice is an acronym for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification. It’s federally mandated in the United States. A company must give it to their workforce before launching a major layoff. It’s a legal buffer designed to give workers, their families, and local communities a head start to prepare or look for new jobs.

Alright — back to bumping rights.

Bumping rights. Sounds kind of harmless, right? What’s that? Here’s what it means.

Bumping rights let a senior employee whose job gets cut take a junior employee’s spot instead of losing the job. No union contract, no bumping rights, means seniority buys you nothing here. Twenty years on the floor and two years on the floor get the same letter.

The company will try to keep the downtown charm. The employees — that’s another story.

The downtown Dallas Neiman Marcus store closes September 30. It’s been standing since 1907. I know, right? 1907. The original building burned in a fire in 1914, and the company rebuilt at Main and Ervay rather than leave downtown. It’s closing now. The company wants to “concentrate resources where our customers prefer to shop.”

Neiman Marcus has a store at NorthPark Center which makes “more than 10 X” what the downtown location makes. They are also planning on incorporating elements of the downtown store into NorthPark so they don’t leave all that 1907-rich history behind. Their restaurant, The Zodiac Room, will move to the NorthPark location.

That’s a real business reason. It’s not wild. It makes sense. It’s in line with what’s going on in the area. Downtown Dallas is bleeding anchor tenants. AT&T’s headquarters is heading to Plano, the Mavericks are leaving American Airlines Center, and the Stars are following. A 119-year-old department store isn’t wrong to notice foot traffic patterns changing around it. If you want your business to thrive, you avoid spending resources on a place with dwindling visitors. Especially if your other store nearby is doing 10 X the volume.

But that logic doesn’t say anything about how the employees get treated on the way out. The ones on their feet all day. The ones who vacuum carpets, help customers, and clean mirrors with that industrial glass cleaner foam you can smell from 27 feet away.

Saks Global says a “significant percentage” of the 67 affected workers may be offered a transfer to the NorthPark Center location instead. MAY BE. Could be. It’s a possibility. The company’s words are “transfer discussions still in process,” and three weeks after the notice went out, nobody affected knows their actual outcome yet.

Whoever isn’t offered a transfer gets what the company calls an “appropriate separation package.” Appropriate says who? That’s not in the filing. It’s the kind of phrase that sounds generous right up until someone asks the company what’s in it.

1,200 + jobs lost

This isn’t Exemplar Luxury Group’s first cut, either — it just wasn’t operating under that name yet when it made this one. The company (then called Saks Global) filed for bankruptcy in January, and by the time it emerged this past June with 75% of its debt gone, it had eliminated more than 1,200 jobs and closed 57 Saks OFF 5th stores, all five remaining Neiman Marcus Last Call locations, and 12 Saks Fifth Avenue stores.

Yes, you read that right. And yes, that’s a ton of debt to offload and a lot of jobs lost.

Saks Fifth Avenue absorbed most of that damage. Neiman Marcus mostly didn’t. It came through with just three closures during the bankruptcy proper, and still has roughly twice as many stores standing as Saks Fifth Avenue does. That’s what makes Dallas interesting. It isn’t a flagship swept up in a company-wide contraction. It’s a deliberate cut to the one brand the restructuring otherwise left alone.

So what actually changes for an employee on the floor? Not much, and that’s the point. A bankruptcy filing gives a company legal cover to shed obligations. It doesn’t let the sales floor team help decide which stores stay open, which employees move, or what a fair separation looks like. It never does.

Some protections do exist for exactly this. If active, they’d let an employee with 20 years of tenure stand tall in their position instead of hoping for a callback about NorthPark. They’d make tenure mean something. Those are protections a union contract provides. This store doesn’t have one. So nobody here has one.

I’d like to tell you Neiman Marcus is unusual for that. It isn’t. Most retail workers in this country don’t have bumping rights. Because that protection was never built into the job in the first place. Dallas just happens to be the store where the company put that fact in writing and sent it to a government office, which means we get to see it transparently instead of guessing.

If you’re behind a register somewhere, know what a WARN letter is. If your company files, they’re legally required to notify you. Read it before you need it. Know whether your job comes with the kind of protection Dallas doesn’t have.

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The Voice of the Frontline is read across 50 states and 71 countries weekly.

Kit Campoy spent 25 years on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor.

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Walmart has two new patents. Both describe AI systems that automatically set prices using your purchase history, your payment method, and your customer ID. But Walmart wants you to know that those patents have nothing to do with the digital price tags it’s installing in every one of its stores by the end of this year.

Sure.

In January, Walmart won a patent for a system that “dynamically and automatically updates item prices.” In March, they won a second. The second is using AI to predict demand and recommend prices based on who you are and what you’ve bought before. Both patents cover Walmart’s e-commerce platform. They promise it has nothing to do with stores. Walmart told the Financial Times that the patents are “unrelated to dynamic pricing.”

A spokesperson tried to quell our fears. “We don’t participate in surge pricing.”

Here’s what’s also true: Walmart is replacing every paper price tag in every one of its 4,600 U.S. stores with a digital one that can change in seconds. Right now that’s roughly 2,300 stores. By December, it’s all of them.

So we’ve got an AI pricing system Walmart swears is walled off from store shelves. We also have a nationwide rollout of the exact hardware that would make real-world dynamic pricing possible. This pricing system is all landing in the same year from the same company.

I’m not the only one adjusting my glasses and keeping track. A grocery industry consultant told the Financial Times that anything resembling dynamic pricing “is playing with fire,” because “consumer trust is being eroded.”

Yes, like 100%. In this economy, it’s even worse. It’s a wildfire.

I’ve been telling you this was coming since June 2024. Cooler doors with cameras in them. Shelf labels that update in a second. The pricing model built for hotel rooms and Lyft rides are now integrated into your local grocery store. If you’ve read my articles for a while, you don’t need the mechanism explained again. If you’re new here: welcome to the part where I get to say I told you so, except Walmart’s still telling you it’s not happening.

The timeline moved fast

Three states didn’t wait to find out if companies are being truly transparent. Maryland, Colorado, and Connecticut have all passed bans on this kind of pricing technology. They’re not overreacting.

A poll commissioned by the grocery workers’ union from May found 68% of Americans worried this kind of pricing would raise their costs, and only 5% thought it would lower anything. Fifty-eight percent said they’d be less likely to shop somewhere using digital tags at all.

This fight’s been underway for a couple of years now. Back in August 2024, Senators Warren and Casey sent Kroger’s CEO a letter laying out exactly how its digital price tags could work. They could build a profile on each shopper, then use it “to determine how much price hiking each of us can tolerate.” Kroger’s response was a flat denial — “Kroger does not and has never engaged in surge pricing.” That’s the same answer every retailer gives, right up until someone proves otherwise.

Surveillance-pricing uses your data to find your personal spending ceiling and then charges you right up to it. They track everything, find the highest price you’ll tolerate, charge it, and call it efficiency. They call it modern retail. If you want the deep dive into my writing about this, the archive’s right here.

What I haven’t told you about yet is what this does to the person standing on the store floor with you.

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The part nobody’s covering: what happens to the frontline.

Every story about this technology talks about what it does to prices. They talk about the consumer. Almost nobody talks about what it does to the job.

I spent 25 years doing price changes by hand — walking the floor with a sticker gun, unjamming the sticker gun every fifteen minutes, and swapping tags one at a time. Sometimes for a full 8-hour shift, depending on how many markdowns hit that week. It’s slow. It’s repetitive. I’m not going to say I miss it. If electronic shelf labels had existed back then, I’d have used them, and I’d have been glad for the time back.

But doing that job by hand built something you can’t automate: you know your store. You know which sticker is wrong before a customer points it out. You know which items were marked down today and which ones were from two weeks ago. You’re the reason the tag and the register match.

Electronic shelf labels save those labor hours. But they take that knowledge away from the employee and hand it to an invisible system that nobody on the floor can question or override.

So when a customer’s app price doesn’t match the shelf — and eventually it won’t, because constant, invisible price movement is the entire point of this technology — the worker standing there has no idea why. No authority to fix it. No information to explain it. Just an angry customer, a price they didn’t set, and a system built so that nobody on the sales floor can answer for it.

The algorithm makes the call. The worker absorbs the consequence (like always). The customer gets no resolution.

That’s the cost nobody’s thought about. You don’t just lose that job skill. You lose the few people in the store who used to be able to tell you, honestly, what’s going on. You replace them with someone holding the bag for a decision made somewhere else entirely. Now, that scenario is not new. The frontline has always taken the heat for decisions made at HQ, but now they’re up against an algorithm. That’s novel.

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The public is catching up. Now what?

For almost two years, I’ve ended these articles the same way: I don’t have the answer, just stay aware, and tell a friend. That’s still true. But something has changed.

Sixty-eight percent of the country is worried about this now. Three states have made it illegal. I wasn’t crying wolf for the past two years. The country’s catching up to what mega retailers do when technology shifts rapidly and they think, maybe, we won’t notice.

Consumers are aware now. That doesn’t mean it all stops. Walmart’s still rolling out shelf labels at every store it owns, patent in hand. They’re betting that “everyone’s worried about it” doesn’t equate to “everyone stops shopping at Walmart.” History says that’s usually a safe bet for them.

So here’s what you can do: if you live somewhere without a ban, your state lawmakers should hear that you don’t want companies to find out what your data says you’ll pay for water on a hot day. And if you’re on the floor watching prices shift in real time with no idea why — you’re not imagining it. And you’re not the one who should be holding that conversation alone.

The Voice of the Frontline is read across 50 states and 71 countries weekly.

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Kit Campoy spent 25 years on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor.

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In March, a Walmart on Christopher Columbus Boulevard in South Philadelphia ripped out its self-checkout lanes and put cashiers back. Dollar General has already pulled self-checkout from more than 12,000 of its stores. Target’s new CEO is funneling money back into store payroll after years of cuts. Cities from Long Beach to Rhode Island are now writing staffing ratios for self-checkout into law because retailers won’t do it on their own.

Nobody in a press release is going to say it plainly, so I will. This is the industry admitting its self-checkout bet failed. They’re just calling it a “customer experience initiative” instead of a total disaster.

In 2024, I wrote Yes, Customer Service is Dying. Retail Companies are Killing it.

Now, here we are. The retail industry’s decision to slash payroll, overwork its employees, and make you do the work isn’t working. No way…wow…you’re kidding.

I watched this happen in real time

I lived in retail stores for twenty-five years. That’s 46,000 hours. From about 1997 to 2022, I lived inside the payroll pullback. Do more with less was the tagline every company tacked on to cuts. For many years, I believed we could. Do more with less. It was a rallying cry.

Then, they cut more.

They cut special hours: training, development, merchandising.
They cut entire positions: visual manager, stock room manager, lead sales.

They eliminated their bench of talent—their future—by cutting five hours a week to make a profit this quarter. They opted for bigger paychecks today (for execs and shareholders, obviously) instead of a healthy business over the next decade.

The retail industry has burned its people to the ground.

They tried to offload some of that work onto you with self-checkouts. They also made the entire experience worse with tiny, plexiglass jails for toothpaste. Then they slashed hourly wages and cut floor coverage. So when you needed an item that they locked up, nobody was available to help you get it.

After five years of this, they’re realizing that they’ve made their customers frustrated, frazzled, and fed up. Yes, it is 100% their fault.

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This isn’t the first time retail has lost its footing

Retail historian Jan Whitaker’s Service and Style traces how downtown department stores — the grand “retail palaces” of the early 20th century — started losing their grip in the 1950s and ‘60s. That decline had an external cause. Populations moved to the suburbs, and the stores that anchored downtown couldn’t follow fast enough.

What’s happening now is different.

Nobody made retailers cut floor staff and hand the register duties to the customer. No outside force pushed self-checkout into 20,000 Dollar General stores. That was a choice. A choice made to hit a number this quarter, with no model for what it would cost ten years out. This is negligence. Now they’re paying to unravel their mistakes.

Retail companies thought we’d all just get on board because this was the future. Sure! We’ll ring ourselves up! Fantastic! They didn’t account for us rejecting it because it is objectively terrible. It’s terrible for employees and for customers. Their restructuring efforts were garbage.

Target admitted it. Four months ago.

You don’t usually get a company narrating its own mistake, but Target basically did. Back in February, new CEO Michael Fiddelke’s turnaround memo cited the exact symptoms of an understaffed floor as the reason customers stopped trusting the store. It cited sloppier shelves, more out-of-stock items, and longer checkout lines.

Yes, it’s a “customer experience” problem. But it’s by design. That is the direct result of slashing payroll hours and eliminating essential leadership positions. The inability of executives to see the cause and effect here should get them fired. Instead, they’ll get a bonus and an extra two weeks of vacation.

Also, Target caused itself irreparable harm when it reversed its DEI initiatives in early 2024. I don’t care what anyone says, Black communities are still boycotting them, ten toes down.

Anyway,

Target’s answer to their “customer experience” problem was to add store labor back and cut 500 corporate and distribution jobs to pay for it. The floor is worth more than the spreadsheet said it was, and somebody finally did the math.

So, four months later, is it working?

Wall Street doesn’t think so. At Target’s annual meeting earlier this month, executive chair Brian Cornell — Fiddelke’s predecessor, who stayed on the board — saw investor support drop to its lowest level ever: 87.2%, down from his historical average of nearly 95%.

That’s not an outright rejection, but it’s a clear sign. Confidence in the old Target leadership hasn’t recovered just because the new CEO said the right things in a memo.

The floor doesn’t think so either.

I ran a quick poll last week on LinkedIn asking people who work in Walmart or Target stores whether they’re feeling the investment in frontline staff. Fifty-three votes: 70% said no, not at all. 23% said it’s too soon to tell. Only 8% said something has actually changed.

That’s the real litmus test. Not the press release. Not the memo. Not their 10-4 policy (the revolutionary smile-and-greet mandate from November). The people standing on the floor, who would know first if anything had actually changed. Mostly, they’re saying it hasn’t.

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The pipeline problem is the same problem

That 70% “no, not at all” vote isn’t surprising if you’ve been watching this for as long as I have. This is the same negligence that’s been emptying the entry-level associate pipeline for a decade.

Retailers cut hours and cut headcount the second self-checkout rolled in. (Actually, way before that.) Then they acted shocked when nobody wanted to build a career standing behind a register that might not exist next quarter. You can’t strip the floor of staff, strip the role of stability, and then complain there’s no talent left to hire when you decide you want employees back.

Retailers built this shortage. Now they’re trying to buy their way out of it. Store by store, lawsuit by lawsuit, city ordinance by city ordinance. Without ever saying, “we were wrong,” and without the people on the floor actually feeling any support.

They don’t have to say it.

The self-checkout stands getting rolled out the back door are saying it for them. The city ordinances are calling it out. The staff on the floor hasn’t felt any relief. The customer experience is still bad. Companies are saying they’re committed. That things will change.

I don’t know that they will.

The Voice of the Frontline is read across 50 states and 71 countries weekly.

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Kit Campoy spent 46,000 hours on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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Here’s when Walmart took $1.00 away from all its newly hired hourly workers.
No, I haven’t forgotten.

This is where I explain Target’s 10-4 policy.

Here’s the boycott breakdowns and why Target is suffering so hard.

Target recently announced that they were partnering with designer Isaac Mizrahi again. Instead of designing a fashion line like he did for Target in the early 2000’s, Target has now named him creative director.

Maybe this was the reason for some of Target’s recent corporate layoffs.

Anyway, Target’s executive vice president, Cara Sylvester, said in a press release,

“Great design is deeply human – it ignites confidence and joy, and it’s what guests tell us they love about shopping at Target.”

In what year, though? 2003?

Because what Target felt like then and what Target feels like now are very different things.

Mizrahi had great influence on Target in the early aughts. I remember it. He helped position Target as chic. He helped make Target Tar-jaayy. We called it that for years because it really did feel like you were in.

You got it. You knew.

Target had it all, and if you knew what you were looking for, you could find the it-girl stuff, too. It was IYKYK before IYKYK.

The designer collabs Target did following Mizrahi were a massive hit. My co-workers planned their week around the Missoni launch. This was must-have stuff. This was no joke. Target made designer collections affordable, and its customers couldn’t get enough.

But it’s twenty-four years later. The country is in a much different place. The Mizrahi partnership may draw some lookie-loos, but I don’t see it driving a turnaround for the brand.

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Target has suffered a downturn because the American administration, which took over in 2024, asked them to reverse their DEI policies. Target complied immediately. No pushback. No shareholder meetings. Just a resounding, “Yes sir!”

Customers are still furious.

The commenters on AP’s article did not hold back

• When they bring back their DEI initiatives, I’ll shop there again. Maybe.

• I don’t care what they do; I haven’t set foot in the store in years and don’t ever plan to.

• Target was among the first to bend the knee to Republicans’ culture war demands to end diversity policies and has been the subject of an ongoing boycott for more than a year.

Target has still not addressed this. It’s the elephant in the room. In March 2025, I reported on Target’s sales falling.

In November, the company rolled out a plan called 10-4 which told associates to smile and greet customers. No, I’m not kidding. Then they had one of the worst Black Friday giveaways ever. Then they pulled back on self-checkouts. They still have them but it’s 10 items or fewer now.

This week, it’s Isaac Mizrahi.

Which, to me, was a shoulder-shrug announcement.

Here’s the thing. People loved Target because they were fiercely inclusive. Remember their huge rainbow displays for Pride? They also leaned into Black-owned businesses. They did an amazing job of making their stores feel like they were our stores—no matter who we were or where we lived.

Sure, they were a corporation. But they were one of the good ones. They’d have your back. You could count on them, like a corporate ally.

They broke decades of trust by throwing their DEI initiatives in the trash the second they were asked to do so. Then they never addressed it, never owned up to it, and promoted an insider to carry on the business as usual.

People are rightfully pissed.

The only way I see Target coming back from this is by addressing the DEI reversal directly. Apologizing for the mistake and taking time to listen to what their customers actually want instead of trying to tell them what they should want.

Making a Black woman CEO wouldn’t hurt either.

But Isaac Mizrahi? Yeah, sure Target, whatever. Don’t expect a rush through the front doors on Saturday morning because it’s not coming. The fashion girlies of the aughts are dealing with heavier shit right now. Mizrahi and Target will not land on their to-do lists this summer. This much I know.

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The Voice of the Frontline is read in 50 states and 67 countries weekly.

Kit Campoy spent 46,000 hours on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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“If I can ever avoid interacting with someone in a customer service setting, I will. I’ll order it online, use self-checkouts, whatever. Interacting with people paid to be nice is cringe.”

I got a comment like this on one of my recent articles. I really thought about it. I asked other people in retail. Is this how people are feeling? Is this change in society widespread? Or is this line of thought an outlier’s view?

Responses ran the gamut, as you may expect.

Here are a few.

“I think forced scripts, mandatory greetings, and any customer service roadmap are cringe. But service, actual hospitality in all its humanness—love it and wish it were more ubiquitous!”

“When it’s done right, it’s magic.”

“I mean, I shop online because of time and availability. And I use self-checkouts because I am cringe. But I would never want all jobs automated…”

Another leader who popped into my DMs had some fantastic insight. They told me I could share some of it anonymously, so here it is.

“Wages stagnate. Cost of living climbs. There’s no real path to a living wage. So why would anyone push to provide exceptional service when the person next to them (who stopped trying months ago) takes home the same check?

They wouldn’t. They don’t.

Service drops to match the pay. Once that happens, customers stop noticing the difference between a human and a machine. And that’s when the automation argument gets easy. Meanwhile, social anxiety is rising. Misanthropy is rising. More people want zero interaction. But those people are quiet in real life, and they’re loud in surveys. Loud in forums. Loud in the data that tech companies use to justify replacing us. I’m exhausted, but I’m not done fighting yet.”

Gosh, man. I put the parts in bold that I haven’t stopped thinking about.

The numbers from The Bureau of Labor Statistics back this sentiment up: the median hourly wage for a retail salesperson was $16.62 in May 2024. That’s nearly $8 less per hour than the national median across all occupations.

I got paid to help people for twenty-five years. I was never fake about it. I literally cannot be a suck-up. It’s not in my DNA. Most days I liked talking to random people who walked through the front doors. Some days it was hell, sure, but you get that in any job.

Making someone’s day better genuinely makes me feel good. Fitting people for jeans was one of my favorite jobs. I loved it. Customers loved me because I was honest with them. I’d say, those are bunching weird, let’s try something else. Or They look good now but they’re going to stretch about an entire size, so think about getting one size down.

Other customers would walk by and slow down to listen. They’d look over their shoulder. Because I was providing a tailored experience: honest, genuine, and kind.

This still exists. I promise you.

Let me tell you about Riley.

Riley Thomas Weber is a ballet instructor, pointe shoe expert, and performance coach. I stumbled upon his TikTok videos this week and was transfixed. I wasn’t the only one.

Some of his videos have millions of views. For the most part, here’s what they are — pointe shoe fittings. Yes, pointe shoes, for ballet.

The camera sits on the floor, so all you see is the dancer’s feet, and Riley sits on the floor behind the feet. He has the dancer wear their original shoes, and then he has them try on a bunch of other brands so they can find the proper fit.

Sound boring?

You wouldn’t believe how many people in the comments are like, I don’t dance, I don’t know anything about ballet, but I watched the whole thing.

Here’s why.

He’s honest. There’s no hedging. He gives his expert opinion, but he listens to the dancers. Do you feel like you’re sinking? Do you have enough room here? Does this one feel better than the last?

Many of these dancers are girls and young women. Some of them are still trying to find their confidence. He listens to them and only them. Not their parents. Not their friends. Not their teachers. They are the only voice, as it should be.

Riley goes on:

“These are ugly, and you have nice feet.”

“Do you have enough room in the heel? Are you lying?”

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After flipping through many of his videos, what stuck out is the absolute care. This is excellent customer care. This is selling, but you don’t notice it because the needs of the person come first.

Just like when I was fitting people for denim. I didn’t care what they bought; I just wanted them to feel amazing in those jeans.

I know that Riley is an expert and part of what he does is fit people for shoes. So, he’s not running the store; he’s doing one very specific thing. But the retail industry can still create these moments for its customers.

That doesn’t happen with one person in a store who is helping everyone, receiving shipment, and trying to do markdowns at the same time. It happens when you have people on the floor who are well trained, your culture is immaculate, and these people are paid well, so they’re not worrying about how they’ll afford lunch.

When I used to fit people for denim, the store was small, but I had enough staff. I could take the extra time and spend an hour with someone if needed.

This is not a lost art. Riley proves it. His expertise is so in demand, you cannot get in for a fitting with him even if you want to. He’s booked.

Retail companies—this could be your stores. You could have customers so in love with your associates that they tell all their friends. They post to social media. It could be a whole vibe. But instead, you opt to starve the frontline of resources and skate by on measly wages.

Your customers could have it all. But you’re making it impossible. So, people opt to buy online and go to self-checkout and avoid people in stores at all costs. Because you’ve created an experience that sucks.

Stop spending all your money to introduce tech to replace your employees. Pay them. Train them. Invest in them. Your customer loyalty will be through the roof, and your turnover won’t be 80%.

I’d bet you on it.

The Voice of the Frontline is read in 50 states and 67 countries weekly.

Kit Campoy spent 46,000 hours on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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I write about how technology is creeping its way into retail often. I didn’t even realize how often, but I was recently skimming through my previous articles, and I was like, “Huh. I have some opinions on this.”

Here’s why.

Retail companies claim they don’t have the money to pay people more. They claim that the managers in place are the only ones they can afford. Whenever they need to save a buck, they pull back on their frontline teams.

Less payroll allocation. Bonuses pulled back. Raises eliminated.

Then they get dazzled by some technology and decide that they must have it. Guess what? They always have the money for that.

AI? Ohmygod! Yes! We neeeed it. Give it to us RIGHTNOW. We don’t want to be left behind.

But in the meantime, they’re leaving behind the very people that make their businesses run. They’re leaving behind the face of their company: the people who talk to and help their customers every day.

It’s so cringe.

Starbucks recently announced that it is pulling the AI it implemented nine months ago.

“Many retailers feel the pressure to say they are doing AI-related things and AI-related innovations and running these things before they’re ready to give concrete and real returns,” - Santiago Gallino, a Wharton professor of operations, information, and decisions, told Fortune.

“Right now, there is more hype than actual benefit.”

So, Starbucks. They implemented this app called NomadGo. It was supposed to keep track of the store’s inventory and order what the location needed. The idea was to save managers’ time. Welp, it didn’t work.

“It started off not particularly accurate and got less accurate over time,” Addison, a Starbucks shift supervisor, told Fortune.

This is why I write about this so much.

Retailers are deploying technologies before they’re ready. Tech companies are churning out “solutions” that the field just doesn’t need.

You know what would’ve helped inventory accuracy? Payroll. Give the manager payroll hours so they can be off the floor to ensure inventory counts are accurate. They understand the nuances of the store and the neighborhood that tech will not get.

Maybe the store is near a university and graduations are coming. The store manager knows they’re going to sell more matcha and oat milk—or whatever—so they plan for that. They ensure they have what they need on hand.

I don’t understand why this is so hard to get.

Retail companies, slow your roll with AI.

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I wrote about it here.

And I wrote about it here.

Then, I wrote about it here.

What I almost never read about is companies adding headcount to stores. Or leadership training programs. In July of last year, Starbucks announced they were hiring an additional eight thousand assistant managers.

But that’s it. I’ve been writing about this for about five years now. That’s the only story I’ve read. Everything else is store closures and layoffs. Everything else is AI—this and technology—that.

But guess what? Your customers want to talk to a human. That’s not going to change. You can implement self checkouts. You can “optimize” schedules with AI. Whatever. I don’t care what you’re selling; customers want to talk to a person when they walk through the front door.

Again, I don’t know why this is hard to grasp. We’ve been doing business like this for thousands of years. It’s in our DNA. Cooperation is how we thrive. But now we’re going to rely on this predictive robot? Hand it all over? Because it’s quick?

But it’s not accurate. And a growing number of people hate AI.

So, what do we do?

We wait. We slow down. We work with smart people and ask good questions. We ask the frontline to help us. Ask them what they need. Ask them what customers want.

Is there a use case for some of this tech? Absolutely.

But too many companies are hooking their brands up to it all willy-nilly.

Fast is not the only metric that counts. Friction isn’t always bad. The most brilliant people I talk to take a measured approach. They observe and listen and ask good questions until the answers reveal themselves.

You know what I think the future is? People. Those who can interact and maintain relationships and make people feel seen will have the edge. So will writers. And yes, I’m biased.

Kit Campoy spent 46,000 hours on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

A few weeks ago, , a journalist, former radio news reporter, and contributor to the New York Times, TIME, and USA Today, invited me on his Substack Live.

This week, we made it happen.

We talked about retail, frontline workers, and why I've spent the last five years making sure their stories get told.

If you've ever wanted to know a little more about what drives this newsletter, this one's for you.

Thank you, Robert, for having me and sharing my work with your community.

Follow Robert’s writing on Substack here:

• Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture

• Iowa Podcasters’ Collaborative

• Iowa Revolution

Have an excellent weekend, friends,

Kit

“Slow down; you’re talking too fast,” she yelled in the middle of the store.

We were in a cell phone provider’s store and this customer was on the phone with customer service. A sales rep went over to try to help be the go-between.

The customer in store was elderly. She’d brought her husband along who waited quietly as she tried to figure out their phone service. I don’t know their age, but I was concerned with how they’d arrived at the store.

Were they still driving?

How were they managing all this on their own?

Everything the store employees said initially made this woman more frustrated, confused, and irritable. But here’s what I want you to know: everyone was patient and treated this woman with such kindness.

We need stores. Let’s talk about it.

The reason I ended up in this store was that my cell phone service provider decided to raise my monthly bill by $20. Again. For funsies.

Not. This. Time.

I was furious. They’d done this to me countless times over the years, and I never had the energy to look for a new company. They were betting on that. “She won’t notice another $20 bump,” they thought.

This time, they were wrong.

This time, I had time.

So, I did some googling; a little comparison shopping. I found another company. My monthly bill was about to be $80 less, and I’d get a discount on streaming services I already used.

I grabbed a cup of coffee. My husband found his flip flops, and we headed to the cell phone provider’s store. While our super-awesome sales rep handled our account setup—and we burned our old provider to the ground—this elderly couple came in.

All of their interactions happened behind me, but I’m a pretty good eavesdropper—I mean, listener. Honestly, I couldn’t avoid hearing all the commotion.

Here’s what this store team got right:

They had an abundance of patience and care. It was genuine. They wanted to help her out and reduce her stress. It wasn’t fake. They didn’t talk over her or dismiss her concerns. They heard her out and guided her.

After a good thirty minutes, the elderly woman got the information she needed and headed for the door—silent little husband in tow.

We asked our sales rep if they get people like a lot, just people confused with their bill or whatever. She said, “Oh, that lady is in here every week.”

I held back the burst of laughter that surged up in my throat.

Of course. I know retail. Of course, she’s in there every week.

I’ve never sold technology, so I cannot imagine the patience needed to explain the latest operating system. But I have sold teenage apparel to parents who didn’t get any of it, so I understand how to patiently explain something that seems obvious to me.

Like, Keds and Vans are very different shoes. They may look like white sneakers to a parent, but no. They are not interchangeable. Do not even suggest it.

Kids need salespeople who know this and who can explain it to their parents. Sometimes other people need cell phone service or operating systems explained to them. Customer service over the phone won’t do. We need a human.

We need stores.

We need people in stores. Always. There is no substitute for this. Robots are not going to cut it. AI cannot be the face of the company. Forget it.

People who work in stores are the face of the brand. They determine how people feel about your company. So, why would you pay them the least? Why would you understaff stores?

I will never know, but it happens every day here in America. Retail workers are scraping by, working with skeleton crews because they’re not given enough. Customers go shopping and then are disappointed by the lack of staff. The employees are stretched too thin.

Retail employs the largest working sector in the country.

Retail stores account for 80% of sales—still. Yes, even though we have e-commerce and we can shop on TikTok. Physical stores still bring in the most money.

My cell phone adventure proved it again: retail stores are community hubs. We all need a place that we can walk into and talk to someone. Get some info. Ask some questions. We all need that.

The company that gets this right will be way ahead of the rest.

It’s time for retailers to start paying the employees who work in stores their worth. Because they are incredibly valuable. They are stewards of the community. We’re all better off because of them.

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Kit Campoy spent 46,000 hours on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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Getting a good cashier will make your day. I know, because I was one.

I ran retail stores for 25 years, and I loved cashiering. It was one of my favorite jobs on a retail floor. I liked seeing all the new faces come up. I liked seeing what they were buying. I liked the upsell, telling them about deals. Customers were stoked when they came through my line. They left feeling better than when they came in. It was a micro-community moment that surged through the day, hundreds of times.

Retailers decided that wasn’t worth paying for.

When self-checkout rolled in, cashier hours got cut. The math looked clean on a spreadsheet though, right? Stores would have fewer people, lower payroll, but the same output. What the spreadsheet didn’t show was what happened to the job itself.

The cashiers who remained weren’t cashiers anymore; they became machine monitors. Crowd control. The person you flag down when the screen freezes. High stress, less support, same or lower pay. The role got hollowed out, and people noticed.

Now Costco, Target, and Walmart are pulling back on self-checkout. Theft is up. Shrink gets priced back into what you pay on the shelf. Frustrated customers are walking out or ordering online.

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I wrote about this two years ago.

This experiment created problems that nobody anticipated, and fixing them is expensive.

Here’s what’s going on in the background - they want cashiers back and they can’t find them. When you spend a decade signaling that a job doesn’t matter — cutting hours, replacing people with machines, turning a human role into a supervisory task — you don’t get to act surprised when the workforce pipeline dries up.

Like, you just don’t.

The checkout experience is the last impression a store makes on you. A good cashier catches errors, knows the deals, and knows the neighborhood. Maybe they’re the reason you come back.

That was never a small thing.
Retailers are learning that now, the expensive way.

Companies that invest in their frontline workers gain the biggest edge in retail. Always have. The self-checkout experiment proved it.

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Kit Campoy spent 46,000 hours on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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There’s a lot going on in retail right now, so I’m going wide this week. Three stories, all connected, all worth your attention.

Because uncertainty and chaos are piling up right now. We’re feeling a bit frozen, unsure of how to move forward. Angry. Fearful. Fed up. Pissed at the rising cost of, well, everything while we watch a labor market do something very weird.

Get ready to pivot.

The labor market is frozen; stores are feeling it

In January of this year, labor economists predicted a “low-hire, low-fire” work environment. Hiring stalled, and very little is moving. This is a frozen market driven by tariff pressures, cautiousness, and general uncertainty.

Here’s what that means on a retail floor. The team you have right now is probably the team you’re going to have for a while. Unless they quit. With turnover at 80%, that possibility is high, unfortunately. But, say people stay. You’re not getting any more help. No reinforcements or support.

Retail added just around 1,000 jobs in January, a number that fits with the stagnant picture we’ve been seeing for months.

So what happens when volume goes up? When foot traffic picks up? When the holiday push hits? You and your current teammates are handling it. Because nobody’s coming. A day off or a proper vacation gets kicked down the road. Because what else are you going to do? Complain? To whom?

I’ve been on floors like that. You have, too. If you don’t work in retail, you’ve seen it as a customer.

Retail is planning for a future without you

Agentic commerce, AI agents making purchases on behalf of consumers, could reach $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030.

Agentic commerce means the AI shops for you. It compares prices, picks the product, and clicks “buy.” No human browsing. No human cashier. You tell your “agent” (your AI) exactly what you want. It searches for products, checks reviews, buys, and has the item shipped to you while you do something else.

Okay. Is there a use case for this? Sure. Will this be the first thing I turn to when I need a new desk chair? Probably not. But who knows, I could get used to it. The technology is SUPER new.

The part nobody’s talking about is the returns. AI will not make the right decision for you every time. So, what happens next? Who fixes it? The associate. A human probably will.

Even as this technology grows, the physical shopping experience remains paramount for a myriad of reasons. Stores still need people. But I guess they need fewer of them, doing harder things, for the same pay.

Retail is hitting $5.6 trillion, but probably not because of you

According to The National Retail Federation, retail sales are projected to grow 4.4% to $5.6 trillion this year.

Big number. Sounds great. But there’s a catch buried in the report. The consumer is bifurcated. Higher-income households are accounting for more of the growth than lower- and middle-income households.

“Bifurcated” is economist-speak for rich people spending freely, and everyone else being careful with every dollar. That’s not only the shopper standing at your register; it’s probably also you.

It’s also me.

Every time I go out for iced coffee, I’m like, It’s how much?

That sounds like a boomer thing to say. I don’t care. Everything is expensive, and it makes me want to eat cereal and never leave my house.

I’m not even really traveling much anymore for fun, and I used to plan a trip somewhere every year, usually somewhere outside the United States. I’ve been all over the world. These days, I look at the price tag and think, never mind. I’m gonna brew some coffee at home and take a walk around the neighborhood.

It’s a weird time. A lot of changes are happening, and they’re coming fast.

Sure, retail is growing. The industry is projecting record revenue. AI is coming for $1 trillion in transactions. But the people running the floors are frozen in place, short-staffed, and watching all of it happen around them. They’re just hoping to get seasonal help and maybe a ten-minute break.

And that’s exactly why this newsletter exists.

The Voice of the Frontline is here because retail news almost never gets told from the floor up. It gets told from the boardroom down. The projections, the forecasts, the billion-dollar technology bets. All of it gets packaged as progress. It is, for some people. But we don’t ever hear from the people who are customer-facing and who know exactly why things don’t work.

If you’re new here, welcome. This is what I do every week. I take the industry headlines and ask the question nobody else is asking: what does this mean for the person on the floor?

If that’s a perspective worth having in your inbox, subscribe below. It’s free. And if you’ve been reading for a while and want to support the work, a paid subscription goes a long way for a one-person operation.

Either way, thanks for being here. You’re the best.

See you next week.

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Kit Campoy spent 46,000 hours on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

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“So few people actually want to learn the ropes in retail anymore because it has just become so abusive and depressing.”— Store leader

Sit with that.

Abusive and depressing.

That’s what people working inside the industry are saying. They’re telling you it’s toxic. They’re saying the system no longer works. Stores don’t get the support they need; people are barely hanging on, and the customer experience is gone.

Last week, I reported on payroll hours. You can read that here.

Today, I’m taking that subject further. I’m breaking down the numbers and highlighting some of the messages I received. Because 55 people stopped scrolling long enough to write something.

The reaction to my LinkedIn post about payroll hours surprised me. It consumed my week, honestly. 6,624 people saw the post. 290 voted. On a platform where most people tap a reaction and move on, 55 people had something to say.

Running a store with a skeleton crew is a huge challenge. I know, I’ve done it. I can only imagine how the store leaders running businesses on even fewer hours feel.

Actually, I don’t have to imagine.

They told me.

Half of the 290 people who voted landed in the lowest bracket I offered: 200-250 hours. This is a bracket I almost didn’t include because I didn’t think anyone was running stores that lean.

Then the comments started coming in.

“Is there an option for less than 200?”

“You need a less than 200 button.”

“Under 200??? This is WILDDDDDD.”

The real floor is lower than the poll captured. Stores running on 170. On 144. On 128. On 117. One manager’s entire weekly budget is 85 hours, and her own salary eats most of it.

Which brings me to something that came up over and over.

The salaried manager trap

In many companies, the store manager’s salary counts against the labor budget. This came up in last week’s piece. The comments confirmed it isn’t isolated. Here’s what it looks like when you run the numbers:

• 144 hours total. 45 go to the store manager. 99 hours left to run the store.

• 117 hours total. 45 go to the store manager. 72 hours left.

• 85 hours total. 45 go to the store manager. 40 hours left.

40 hours. For a store open seven days a week.

One manager said it flat out: “I get about 117 hours, 45 of which is me. This is with an expectation of a high level of customer engagement. Visual and operational excellence are also required. No, it’s not enough.”

No, it’s not. But here we are. This is the model. Chosen. Maintained. Defended. Reduced further every year.

Running a store alone is not sustainable or safe

The most repeated detail across every comment was that the opening manager is alone on the floor until noon or 1 PM. Every day. Not occasionally. Routinely. It is the plan handed down by HQ.

“It’s single coverage almost daily until noon or 1, which is NOT beneficial to customer coverage.”

“Single person open until 12. It was awful.”

“M-Th the opening manager worked alone until noon. Was it enough? No.”

What about customers? Don’t companies care about them anymore? They always said they did. Now, I don’t know.

The customer who can’t find anyone to help them leaves. They order the item online, maybe. That loss never shows up on the payroll report. Maybe your conversion metrics get dinged, but then the company saves on hours, so they take that as a win.

It’s not.

Some responses to the post celebrated how well retail leaders adapt, but they glossed over the struggle.

Retail leaders are some of the most adaptable people in the world. But I’m worried we’re leaning into toxic positivity with comments like, “Retail is about the people! We always get it done—even with tight payroll goals.”

The leaders at HQ don’t need one more yes-man. They have that covered. If we continue sucking up and telling them their plans are working, it will get us nowhere except for fewer payroll hours and a later closing time.

The adaptability of retail leaders is real. So is what’s being done with it.

When resilience becomes the justification for cutting resources, it stops being a compliment. Companies are not investing in their people’s adaptability. They are spending it down. There is nothing left to spend.

The hiring pipeline is now a pain point

A few years ago, one manager had more applicants than she could get through. Two months ago, she posted an assistant manager role. Not a single applicant.

Cut starting pay. Eliminate training. Push bonuses out of reach. Raise the goals. Then HQ wonders why nobody’s applying.

Retail used to have management training programs. We had a career ahead of us and a roadmap to get there. Come in, learn the business, build a future. That promise is gone. What replaced it is a three-hour shift with no onboarding and a manager who is too stretched to show you anything.

The industry built this disaster one cut at a time. But I’m not giving up.

How we influence change

Someone in the comments asked how we influence change.

We talk about it as an industry. Like this.

The future of any retail business is in the people on the frontline. Labor cannot keep being treated as a cost to cut. Employees are not supported. Customers are not cared for. The model is not working, and the people running stores know it better than anyone at headquarters does.

We need to keep saying it out loud until someone with the authority to change it gets uncomfortable enough to act.

One manager is “treading water and starting to drown.” One is working a side hustle to make ends meet on a store manager’s salary. One hasn’t taken a vacation day in years because one day off blows the budget. One is afraid to speak up because she needs to keep her job.

These are not fringe cases. This is the industry.

290 people voted. 55 commented. The DMs kept coming after the poll closed.

People are hungry to say this out loud because nobody inside their companies will listen.

I’m listening. Keep talking.

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Kit Campoy spent 46,000 hours on the frontline leading retail teams. Now she writes about it. Author of The Retail Leader’s Field Guide and the voice behind this newsletter covering retail news and labor every week.

Keep reading …

We covered a lot of ground, but the thread running through all of it was the same: retail leadership is getting harder, the resources are getting thinner, and the people actually doing the work are the last ones anyone asks.

Here’s what we got into:

• Store managers are running entire buildings on under 200 payroll hours a week and flooding my DMs with proof.
  What that number actually means on the floor.

• Private equity doesn’t calculate loyalty when they do the takeover decks. The hidden cost PE firms never see coming.

• “I felt like I was on a retail treadmill.”
  The before/after of finally having enough staff to actually lead and why HQ never notices the difference.

Know a retail leader who's running on fumes? Send this their way.

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We also talked about my new masterclass, Leading Through C.H.A.O.S., available now through The Campus at Worthy Retail. If you've ever walked into a shift and had your entire plan blown up before 10am — this is for you.

It's a framework built from real floor experience, not a training module someone wrote in a conference room.

Check it Out Here