S6E9 Mark Ryski on why stores convert up to 70% of store traffic while online only converts 3% and Amazon only 10%. 77% of shoppers who walked out of a big box store without buying told exit interviewers they came in to buy. They couldn't find help, wouldn't wait in line, and left empty-handed. Mark Ryski has spent almost 3 decades m...

S2E10 NRA Chief Economist Dr. Chad Moutray on the 2026 restaurant labor market, 122% turnover, and the price of running a shift short. One missing employee can cost a restaurant $3,000 to $5,000 in lost sales over three months. That's just one shocking stat from the National Restaurant Association's new 2026 Hiring & Staffing report....

The Vitamin Shoppe’s Andy Laudato on How Retail Leaders Are Scaling Innovation Without Losing Their Culture. Scaling innovation is one of the hardest skills in retail leadership, and it’s exactly what we dig into this episode. Andy Laudato, COO of The Vitamin Shoppe and author of Fostering Innovation, returns to share his playbook fo...

S2E7 Louisa Loran on The Leadership Capacity Gap - Why Retail Transformation Stalls in the AI Era. What if the biggest obstacle to retail transformation isn't your tech stack or your budget, but the people sitting in the corner offices? In this episode of Retail Transformers, Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden sit down with Louisa Loran...

Greg Buzek of IHL Group on RFID, Computer Vision, Edge Computing, and the Returns Opportunity with AI. BOPIS sounds like a solved problem. It’s not. In IHL Group's 2026 Retail Transformation Study, only 18.2% of retailers have optimized BOPIS. The most profitable retailers are a staggering 555% more likely to have it dialed in than t...

Julie Averill, Chief Impact Officer, on Retail AI Transformation & Human-Centered Leadership. Everyone in retail is chasing AI right now, and most of them are about to learn an expensive lesson. In this episode of Retail Transformers, Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden sit down with Julie Averill, the former Global CIO of Lululemon and ...