Retail Watchers

At the restaurants I visit regularly it seems like Olive Garden, Texas Roadhouse and Red Robin are still using the Ziosk tablets, and aside from refreshed hardware I don't think the user experience has really changed much since they appeared nearly 10 years ago. I did notice that the Utah (Sizzling ...

Sugar House is probably the closest thing SLC has to a "hipster" neighborhood so I imagine Trader Joe's might do well there. I know the store in Draper (State Street and 11400 S) just opened last year and the Cottonwood Heights store (which I think was actually on the larger side for a Tra...

The issue with the bigger self checkouts at Walmart (at least at the store I shop at), most of the time the belts on the "big" self checkouts are either turned off or not functioning, which means you pretty much have to just scan stuff out of your cart the same way you would in the self ch...

It seems like Subway changes back and forth between Coke and Pepsi products far more frequently than other chains, to the point that I suspect they switch back and forth pretty much each time the contract ends. Pepsi seems to be unusually popular in North Carolina (presumably since it was originally...

Costco has also been known to sell gray market products (particularly in softlines) by finding products that can be purchased cheaply in foreign markets and reselling in the US, so it's possible some of these products have come from that. There have been instances where manufacturers have actually t...

It does appear that Sheetz does still have shakes available, so I assume they would still need to have a soft serve machine behind the counter for those. I also see that QuikTrip has soft serve cones/cups and shakes available served from behind the counter, so it's possible Sheetz could move to the ...

At the local Sheetz today I saw that the soft serve machines in the store were no longer available, with signs indicating that they are being removed from all Sheetz stores, and will be replaced with some other unspecified item in the future. One report on Reddit claims that they'll be replacing the...

I remember that the City of Philadelphia and State of New Jersey made laws banning cashless stores (calling it discrimination) After Amazon Go stores opened up there in 2019, requiring those stories to offer an option to pay in cash. I wouldn't be too surprised if California did the same thing at so...

A couple of years ago when I still lived in WA there was a new 7-Eleven location in Everett (converted from what I believe used to be a Mobil station with a generic C-store on Everett Mall Way) where they built the whole thing out, then upon completion of the store they mothballed it, fenced off the...

My sister in law from Utah visited us last week, and we spent the weekend down in Charlotte. I made a point of stopping in at a QuikTrip while we were down there just so she could see the two entire walls full of fountain drinks and coffees/teas they have. She actually lives right near a fairly nice...