ANDMORE just renamed the “Temporaries” at Atlanta, Dallas, and Las Vegas markets to “First Finds.” Atlanta is a few weeks out — June 9-14 — and the rebrand debuts there. Here’s what most people will scroll past. “First” is a positional word. It implies a second. The rebrand isn’t just a new name; it’s ANDMORE…
Lily Ray flagged something worth reading this week: AI models are increasingly training on content other AI models wrote, and every round of that loop makes the output a little worse. She calls it the AI Slop Loop — a copy of a copy of a copy, until what’s left looks right but isn’t. That…
I was reading something this morning about AI companies fighting over who gets to keep the six months of context they’ve built on you — how you write, what you know, every question you’ve ever asked them — and it hit me that every independent retailer I know is living that same story and doesn’t…
Adobe just dropped Q1 2026 numbers, and AI-referred traffic to US retailers jumped 393% year over year. Shoppers arriving from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode convert 42% better than traditional traffic and spend 37% more per visit. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a channel shift. But here’s the other half of the…
Originally published as Tidbit #245. “Without craftsmanship,inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.” — Johannes Brahms Craft is the foundation. Taste is the fingerprint. In high school I took three years of Spanish. The second year was heavy on grammar. I loved it. Give me a verb to conjugate — I could do…
The White House budget proposal that dropped this week cuts SBA funding by 67% — from a billion dollars down to $329 million. That means SCORE mentoring, Small Business Development Centers, and Women’s Business Centers are all on the chopping block. These are real programs that real shop owners have leaned on to figure out…
A security team just discovered 108 Chrome browser extensions — from five different publishers — that were quietly stealing Google login credentials, browsing history, and personal data from roughly 20,000 users. These weren’t sketchy-looking downloads. They were ad blockers, QR code tools, emoji keyboards — the kind of thing you install once and forget about….
The U.S. Navy began blockading the Strait of Hormuz yesterday — 13 warships, no ships in or out of Iranian ports. Twenty percent of the world’s oil moves through that strait. Gas is already up 38% since this conflict started, diesel is above $5.80, and shipping costs are climbing across the board — FedEx and…
Anthropic walked away from a $200 million government contract to protect what they built. The best independent retailers make the same kind of call every season. Plus: USPS rates jump 8% on April 26 and shipping costs aren’t coming down soon.
Indie retailers don’t have a benefits department. Here’s a rule change the Walmart benefits team will catch — that you need to catch yourself. What the quiet Nasdaq-100 rule change means for your retirement account.