Headline of the year.

And Chad, you get to start this one.

Open the envelope, please, sir.

Here we go.

Headline of the year.

Very intrigued in what?

I love the sound effects we've got going on for this show.

We've got actual envelopes opening.

All right, interesting.

Okay, so US retail store closures up almost 70% this year.

Wow.

Yeah, kind of like a collection of headlines versus a singular one.

Yeah.

This year has had an alarming number of retailers continue to Destore in the U.S.

you know, according to Coresight, which was footnoted on, on this envelope.

Right.

There's been over 3,100 store closures through, through end of November.

That's up, you know, almost 70% versus last year.

45 retailers have filed for bankruptcy.

There were 25 last year.

And a lot of these companies had years of just store proliferation, only to see their value proposition threatened by a lot of channel blurring occurring in retail more broadly and are now scaling back in order to reset and really align on kind of strategically where they're going to compete.

So you have discount players like Family, $99 cents, Big Lots, the whole pharmacy retail space, CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid all alone.

Even the convenience store chain, you know, 7 11, to a lesser extent, Circle K and then, you know, some fashion brands, Route 21, among others.

Right.

Those, those are really the areas kind of driving it.

So it's a, it's a real sign of, of struggle, but, you know, indicative of this cumulative retail network which is, you know, very overstored and is going through some, you know, level of course correction.

Yeah, that's a really interesting one, especially because I feel like we're also starting to hear about more, more stores rethinking or reinvesting for 2025 in their store experiences.

So, yes, closing some down, but really getting hyper focused on what they're going to do to make the stores that still exist really worth driving traffic to.

Great pick.

Chad and David, let's go to you, Dave Ritter.

What's your headline of the year?

My headline of the year is that Walgreens is in talks to sell itself to private equity firm Sycamore.

It's a good one.

Why?

About a decade ago, Walgreens was worth a hundred billion dollars and had 12,000 stores.

Earlier this year, they announced that over a quarter of its stores are unprofitable.

Between headwinds from PBMs and slowing retail sales, its stock has slid 70%.

I think if this is a follow on to Chad's point about the kind of winds of Change in certain segments of the industry.

But, but for Walmart or Walgreens to, to offer themselves up for sale to a private equity firm is pretty insane.

Yeah, definitely.

Kind of indicative of what we were talking about earlier with store closures.

Just, you know, the toughest times for those businesses are changing, especially with a lot of retailers moving into online pharmacy this year too.

Stealing some of that share.

That's a, that's a great one, Dave.

Chris, I want to hear yours next.

You want to hear mine of the year?

Yeah, I don't think mine's as good as Dave's actually, so.

And I've actually been wondering if we should vote at the end of, like, who had the best pick.

But, but right.

So right now Dave gets my vote, but I'll share mine just in case, you know, somebody else likes it.

They want to, they want to pick it over days.

But mine is that Amazon walked away from its just walkout technology in its grocery stores and in place of smart cards, too.

I think that's an interesting angle to the story.

You know, the computer vision system, it held so much promise and it still does in my opinion.

But, but the walkout angle, just.

Consumers don't care about it.

You know, that's what we learned about it.

They just, it's not that big of a differentiator to make the investment in the technology work.

You have to get something else out of it, which I think we'll start to see.

But we'll start to see it come through different manifestations of it, like robots in store or other applications of cameras throughout, throughout the store.

It's just, but you know, it's just, it's.

For Amazon, it's going to work in stadiums.

Like the video you just shot out at Lumen Field and you just released this weekend.

For those that haven't seen it, it's going to work in environments like that.

Environments that are high throughput, hard to staff, but at the end of the day, no one cares about just walking out in a grocery store.

Yeah.

Chris, who are we talking to this year?

I remember we did an interview with somebody and I remember you specifically calling out, like, if they change the name from Just Walk Out Technology to like, just strictly like computer vision for inventory accuracy, like that would be that, that in itself is like, that's the technology angle.

It's just the wrong focus or wrong emphasis.

Right.

Yeah, right.

I think, I think it was a fast five.

Weekly Fast five.

Might have been with Ben Miller or Joe Laszlo too.

I don't remember.

But yeah, no, that was the point.

Yeah, I was like, I think they just marketed this thing the wrong way, honestly, you know, because.

And then you don't, you don't also need the degree of accuracy that you need to actually make sure that the transactions are happening the right way too.

So that's got to be cheaper as well if you were to pitch it that way.

But I don't know.

And what was yours though?

Well, no one's going to be shocked if they've ever listened to our show on my retail headline of the year because it is the Google Shopping updates.

I think that this is a huge thing because it's changing the way that it's, I think we saw this year the beginning of a waterfall of events that change how we start shopping and how we search for products online.

And yes, you have other retailers, Walmart's doing this.

You have other AI platforms like Perplexity and OpenAI that are also, you know, really enabling language based search.

But I think that Google still owns so much of search.

They're still the first place that we go as consumers when we're looking to find something.

And then now you add in Google Lens as a secondary option using the visual search and large language based search.

I think this is a huge, huge component to how we're going to be shopping in 2025 and beyond.

Plus you also add in some of the other things that they, they've added like tracking information at the top of your Google or your Gmail inbox to know exactly when products are coming and real time pricing, display and availability on that first search page when you're searching for something.

I just, I think we have to give huge kudos to Google this year for what the, these strides that they've made in shopping.

All right, so, so I think so.

I don't, I.

So that's a pretty good one too.

I think it's between David and Chad.

You get the tiebreaker here.

Who wins retail headline of the year?

Ann always wins.

Ann always wins.

Yeah.

The thing I love about my partner, she's, she's out nothing if not died in the wool consistent with her, with what she loves and talks about.

So.