Guest co-host Anne Mezzenga, Founder & CEO of Retail Field Report, joins Steve and Michael for a macro check on fuel, rates and tariffs, then earnings from Five Below, Victoria's Secret, Lululemon and Kohl's. Anne takes us inside her flex retail shifts, hospitality-first store roles and a Target walk with executives, before the trio debates Anthropic's Claude Commerce Agents and Shein's Hong Kong debut. On the radar: Quince's brick-and-mortar ambitions, and JBS's beef imports — boon or burden for grocers?
Remarkable Retail Episode 311 welcomes guest co-host and longtime friend of the pod Anne Mezzenga, Founder & CEO of Retail Field Report, joining Steve Dennis and Michael LeBlanc on mic and on camera.
Anne opens with her new venture, launched in March as an evolution of the work she built at Omni Talk Retail with co-founder Chris Walton. Retail Field Report takes a journalist's lens rather than an analyst's — working shifts in stores, interviewing executives and walking floors to learn what's actually happening inside retail organizations, not what the headlines claim.
The news opens on a shaky macro backdrop: diesel at a four-year high, the priciest Labor Day gas in a year, worse still across Europe, and a Fed narrative that has flipped from cuts to a 62% market-implied probability of at least two hikes by year-end. Michael adds the Canadian view — reciprocal tariffs, shelved US liquor and a tourism reversal after June's 5% bump in cross-border travel. Anne reports from the field: once fuel, healthcare and food are covered, the discretionary spending big-box retailers count on is running dry.
On earnings, Steve unpacks Five Below's five straight quarters of double-digit comps, 23% revenue growth, its move past 2,000 stores and a rare guidance raise. Victoria's Secret posts a 9% comp; Anne credits store consistency, omnichannel execution and strength in PINK and beauty, and the pair explore whether GLP-1s — increasingly prescribed alongside hormone replacement therapy — are quietly reshaping apparel and beauty demand. Lululemon disappoints, with comps down 9% and the Americas down 12% as Heidi O'Neill steps in as CEO; Anne argues the brand needs a sharper point of view and less rinse-and-repeat product. At Kohl's, Steve flags a second straight quarter of Sephora underperforming the rest of the store.
The centerpiece is Anne's work as a flex retail associate, booking shifts through the Reflex app in cities across the US: point-of-sale systems so intuitive that training is nearly obsolete, twelve strangers running a warehouse sale that moved 3,000 customers in a single shift, and hospitality-only roles at Longchamp in Boston and Sézane in San Francisco, evidence that mid-tier retailers are putting real P&L dollars into the welcome.
The trio then debates Anthropic's open-source Claude Commerce Agents — throttled assortments in agentic pilots, returns exposure, and grocery shoppers splitting weekly lists across banners by price. Anne walks Target stores with executives and lands bullish on the Bullseye, while Steve sizes up Shein's Hong Kong listing at roughly $27 billion against its one-time $100 billion valuation.
On the radar screens: Quince's rumored raise and brick-and-mortar ambitions (Steve's skeptical the assortment translates), and Michael on JBS, the world's biggest meat processor, Brazilian beef imports, and whether beef can price itself out of the grocery basket for good.