The V Spot Week 28 - A Week of Reckoning

Welcome to the VSpot, your home for e-com and early news. Well, this week sales dipped, robots rose, managers disappeared, and TikTok just laid off. Only humans left. It's like retail is doing a full reboot, just zero plot given. If you're still trying to figure out what's happening, just relax. Nobody does really. We're here to try and help you figure it all out without the clarity of a McKinsey report. This week's episode is, as ever, powered by Omnisend. An email and SMS platform for merchants who don't have time to learn how to high-five other tools or decipher acronyms like CBP, ERP, or RFM, even though you should probably know them. With Omnisend, brands earn $68 for every $1 spent, or what Bolt might just call just another Tuesday valuation. Whether you're a veteran to flows or campaigns, it's plug and play, easy enough for the CMO who's not really a CMO Link in the post for 30% off your first 3 months. Omnisend, our partner this week. So let's do the news. Retail sales, more like retail stalls. US retail sales dropped 0.9% in May, the sharpest fall this year. Cars and furniture slumped, but online sales just about held steady. Consumers are chick— clicking one-click checkout for stress. But hey, at least Shopify's still smiling. Next up, and it's Walmart, they joined the great manager Mo down Seasonal, I guess. Walmart and Wayfair are cutting layers of middle management. What they're trying to do is flatten org charts. To translate, they're saying, congratulations, you're now reporting directly to someone in Slack or a Slackbot. TikTok Shop is now TikTok Shop. Oof, that was rough. TikTok's e-commerce arm is quietly letting go of even more staff. The algorithm might be sticky, but the HR policy is on shuffle mode, as I see it. It's like musical chairs, but the chairs are disappearing in retail in real time and we're still dancing. Well, I guess it's TikTok, right? Amazon hits the budget banks. Amazon's frozen its hiring budget for retail in 2025. Growth? Yes. Humans? No, not so much. Alexa, hire no one and double my EBITDA sort of thing. I do. And then next story, rise of the robotic middle class. Amazon is redefining warehouse jobs as we see it. New roles include robot babysitter and mechanical therapist. Seriously. Congratulations, you're now managing Carl, a 900-kilogram or pound, depending on what side of the metric system you fall on, shelf-lifting droid with no PTO and a better attitude than Steve working in accounting. Prime Day will be AI's coming-out party. Amazon Prime Day now 4 days this time. It's just finished and sales were meh because time is fake anyway. I will generate $23.8 billion with GenAI shopping assistance playing a bigger role than ever. That is according to Adobe. I don't really believe that report. It reads like nonsense. Your cart has never felt more judged or more upsold by a machine. Shopify AI does everything now but fulfill orders. Shopify roll out generative AI to build out your entire store. But we know all this. Voice prompts, banners, copy, all done by robots. What's left for us humans to do? Now you can launch a D2C brand at 2 AM, have 3 tequilas, go on a TikTok binge. Sure, isn't life perfect? This is what we all want in this brand new world. Let's just have a look at the week that was. Sales are sliding, managers are vanishing, AI handling more than your intern ever could or did. Didn't even have to pay them. Maybe you did that with your interns too. Retail is not dying, it's just morphing into a tech log. Fever dream. Um, yeah, but it's all about the people though, right? Humans are optional. Uh, stay sharp, stay weird, and if in doubt, blame the org chart. That's what everybody else does. Thanks again to Omnisend, the email marketing tool that is genuinely useful, not just another SaaS for you to cancel. Uh, it plays nicely with Shopify, makes you look good in meetings, and yes, real humans still answer the phone line. Uh, use my link to get 30% off in the first 3 months, and you'll finally make your flows feel like they're less than a cry for help. Uh, you've been watching the V Spot. That is the 4 and a half minutes you're not getting back this week.