You could say that Joel Bines wrote the book on customer-centric retail approaches, and not just because he’s been a retail consultant for more than two decades, primarily as a managing director at AlixPartners before striking out on his own to form Spruce Advisory in 2023. You also could say it because Bines did write a book on the subject: The Metail Economy: 6 Strategies for Transforming Your Business to Thrive in the Me-Centric Consumer Revolution.

When the book was published in 2022, Bines told Retail Brew that although retailers have always said they put customers first, he had observed that “rarely was the customer even part of the vast majority of the dialogue in boardrooms.”

The book argues that in today’s consumer-centric “metail” paradigm, retail executives should take a lesson from Costco, which makes the hoses on its gas pumps extra long to reach the gas tank even if shoppers pulled in on the wrong side. It’s a convenience apt to delight customers, Bines told us at the time, but it’s also a way to sell more gas, because, “if you come at it from a logistics perspective, you get massively more throughput through the gas lines than you would if you had to have cars backing up and moving around to get on the other side.”

We’ve been covering the growing ubiquity of locked display cases, which retailers including Target and CVS have installed to curb what they claim is a growing problem of shoplifting rings contributing to stores’ overall merchandise losses (aka “shrink”), so we wondered if Bines had any thoughts about the practice.

Keep reading here.—AAN

The cannabis industry, like many of its more ardent consumers, tends to march to the beat of its own (jam band) drummer, and that certainly holds for its biggest sales events.

The biggest shopping days for cannabis retailers is not Black Friday or Cyber Monday but rather April 20 (a wink to the common cannabis term, 420) and the day before Thanksgiving, known as Green Wednesday.

This year’s results are in, and they’re nothing to sneeze—or cough—at. Sales revenues at dispensaries increased an average of 91% over a typical Wednesday, and the average cart size was up 9%, to $70.80, according to Dutchie, a point of sale and e-commerce platform used by more than 6,500 dispensaries in the US and Canada.

Keep reading here.—AAN

With Thanksgiving right around the corner, most people might have their minds on copious amounts of pie and the three big NFL matchups of the day. Slowly but surely, though, brands are turning their attention to the biggest football game for 2025.

Instacart will run its first Super Bowl ad in the 2025 game, it announced Thursday, becoming the latest of a few brands joining in on the action for the first time. The news came on the heels of Dove’s Tuesday announcement that it will also advertise in the game, marking a back-to-back big-game effort after the brand sat out for almost two decades.

Cart runneth over: Instacart isn’t entirely new to football—it’s currently running a spot called “Kazoo” timed to the fall football season, according to a press release.

Keep reading on Marketing Brew.—AM