Retail is hard.
The panel about it doesn't have to be.

Shoptalk is one of the last conferences where you can still meet a real merchant, a real buyer, and a real founder in the same forty-foot hallway. That is worth defending.

What isn't worth defending: the panel where three vendors and a moderator say "unified commerce" thirty-eight times in forty-five minutes and nobody in the front row remembers a specific thing they learned.

Shop Blather roasts the format. We roast retail media networks that are 40% deck and 60% wishful thinking. We roast the "future of the store" panel that has, as of 2018, been about six panels running in parallel with slightly different clip art.

We do not roast the operators. The person who runs the planogram for a chain with 3,400 stores has the hardest job in this building. The founder shipping DTC socks out of a warehouse in Ohio is doing more real work by Tuesday morning than a keynote gets done in a quarter.

If the site made you laugh, forward it to the person you're meeting at Border Grill on Wednesday. If you disagree — bring the receipts.

— Shop Blather, a Panel Fatigue theater · a High Caliber AI joint