You Don’t Have to Be Excited About AI
When you run a small business, every hour of every day is already accounted for. There’s no oxygen left for “and also let me reconsider what a computer can do.” That’s not a flaw — that’s survival.
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Walmart Got Tariff Refunds. Your Manufacturer Didn’t.
Big-box retailers are filing tariff refund claims for billions. The small manufacturers behind your shelves can’t — and most never passed the full tariff bill on to you in the first place.
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Memorial Day 2026: One Holiday, Two Customers in Your Store
AAA projects 45 million Memorial Day travelers — but 40% of lower-income households can’t afford to go anywhere. Two very different customers will walk into your store this weekend.
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The One Thing AI Still Can’t Do (And You Do Every Day)
Tacit knowledge — what your team notices in conversation — is your store’s moat. Here’s how to capture it before it evaporates.
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If the NYT Can’t Catch AI Slop, You Won’t Either
The NYT just quoted words a politician never said — an AI hallucination. Three checks every retailer should run on AI-written copy before publishing.
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What Mother’s Day Shoppers Are Asking ChatGPT This Year
ChatGPT just became smarter overnight, and your Mother’s Day customer is using it. What that means for your product page copy this weekend.
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Trusted Software Got Hacked. Here’s Your Quiet Fix.
Fake software installers signed with real certificates infected thousands of computers this week. Here’s the five-minute passkey upgrade every shop owner should make on World Passkey Day.
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Maryland’s Surveillance Pricing Ban: What It Means
Maryland just passed a law that will quietly reshape American retail. Starting October, the biggest grocery stores in the state — anything over 15,000 square feet — can no longer show different prices to different shoppers based on data the store collected about them. A gallon of milk will cost the same to every shopper…
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AI Doesn’t Bookmark Your Store. It Re-Picks Every Week.
An SEO researcher counted something this week that I keep turning over: when AI tools like ChatGPT or Google’s AI answer a customer’s question, they don’t use the same sources two weeks in a row. ChatGPT swaps out roughly three of every four sources every single week. Google’s AI swaps out about half. In plain…
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What You Lose When the Algorithm Changes
A line jumped out at me over the weekend, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since: “The leaders renting their memory from someone else’s app will lose their institutional knowledge the moment they close the tab.” That isn’t a tech sentence. That’s a retail sentence. Every store has a memory. The customer names you’ve…