Retail in America – Details, episodes & analysis

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Retail in America

Ron Thurston

Business

Frequency: 1 episode/32d. Total Eps: 52

RETAIL IN AMERICA is a conversation about running stores and leading people. Ron Thurston talks with the executives, founders, and frontline retailers shaping where the industry goes next: what they're building, what they got wrong, and what it takes to grow a business at store level. Retail leadership, store operations, customer experience, culture, and the technology underneath it. Season 3 is about the human edge of selling — how the best retailers win with people, presence, and craft. Ron Thurston is an NRF Retail Voice, a Top 100 Retail Technology Influencer, a ReThink Retail Top Retail Expert, and a two-time #1 bestselling author. New episodes regularly.

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Score global : 79%

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Nobody Buys Software Off a Demo: How Deals Actually Start — with Eric Aubertin, TrueLynk

Season 3 · Episode 5

Tuesday, September 8, 2026 • Duration 35:49

AI can write an email that sounds exactly like you. It can personalize at a scale no sales team ever could. And that is precisely why the inbox stopped working. When every message sounds human, none of them get read.

Eric Aubertin, founder and CEO of truelynk (https://truelynk.com), has built his sixth company on the one thing buyers still trust: a warm introduction from someone they know.

Eric's story doesn't start in software. It starts on the ice, drafted by the Montreal Canadiens and playing for Canada. Since then he has started, built and sold company after company. truelynk is number six, and it rests on a simple observation: the vouch, the "you need to talk to this person," is the most valuable and most wasted asset in business.

Ron is an advisor to truelynk, disclosed up front in the episode.

IN THIS EPISODE

Why nobody buys retail technology off a demo
The blind spot in LinkedIn: everybody is connected, nobody knows who actually knows who
What AI did to cold outreach, and why the human became the filter
Relationship ratings, and sorting 30,000 connections in minutes instead of months
Quality introductions versus matchmaking, and how advisors get paid
Who the platform is for on both sides, and who should not bother
Why 85% of decisions start with a referral, and what it would take to make that a channel
The lesson Eric believes more deeply now than when he started: this is an engagement problem

LINKS

truelynk — https://truelynk.com
Become a truelynk advisor — https://truelynk.com/advisor
Eric Aubertin on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericaubertin/
Ron Thurston on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/rthurston/
Ron Thurston — https://ronthurston.com
The newsletter — https://ron-thurston-newsletter.netlify.app/

If this conversation changed how you think about how you sell, who you know, or who vouches for you, pass it on to someone who needs to hear it.

Subscribe and follow.

Thank you!

Ron

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Balance Is Bullsh*t: Cut Your Life From 25 Things to 5 with Loretta Soffe

Season 3 · Episode 4

Tuesday, July 21, 2026 • Duration 40:58

S3E4 — Balance Is Bullsh*t: Cut Your Life From 25 Things to 5 with Loretta Soffe

Retail in America · Season 3: The Human Edge of Selling

She pulled into her driveway with her hands still on the wheel and couldn't get out of the car. Inside the house: three kids, a husband who had paused his legal career for what they thought would be one year and became twelve. Outside: the title, the corner office, the private plane, the front row at fashion week. Everything in the picture was perfect, and she was completely, quietly exhausted.

Loretta Soffe spent 25 years climbing Nordstrom — sales floor to Executive Vice President of a $2 billion division — until the day she was fired at the peak. Asked recently whether she'd have quit if they hadn't fired her, she stopped cold: probably not. That's what golden handcuffs do.

What she figured out afterward became a book, a framework, and this conversation.

The Edge: The 25-to-5 exercise. Write down 25 things sitting on your calendar, your to-do list, your phone, your brain. Now force it down to five. Loretta runs this with rooms of women aged 20 to 65, and what falls off is never what people expect — the cupcakes for the soccer team, the recurring meeting that recurs for no reason. What's already gone is fitness. Date nights. The things that mattered. The audit is where the aha lives, and it's the one step of her Self Architect Method she goes deep on here.

The Truth: Trying to do all things, all the time, at once gives you exactly two outcomes — burnout or mediocrity. The alternative isn't balance. It's going 150% in when it counts, with the confidence that the rest of your life is built to hold. And that requires letting go of a standard of success you never chose in the first place.

Also in this episode: why what got you here is exactly what stops you from seeing you're drowning. Why your network is your net worth, and why mentorship runs both directions. And the hardest chapter in her book — "A Boss, a Bitch, or a Bold Brave Leader" — on the reorg where the men were praised as efficient and direct for the same decisions that got her called difficult, overanalyzing, and slow.

"Fair is something you pay on the bus."

The Human Edge, Amplified with Tulsi Keshkamat, Microsoft Teams

Season 3 · Episode 3

Tuesday, June 30, 2026 • Duration 45:52

The Human Edge, Amplified — with Tulsi Keshkamat (Microsoft Teams for Frontline)

What if the technology to transform your frontline already exists — and you're already paying for it?

In this episode of RETAIL IN AMERICA, sponsored by Microsoft, Ron Thurston sits down with Tulsi Keshkamat to unpack one of retail's biggest blind spots: the gap between what frontline technology can do and what most retailers realize they already have. Tulsi shares why Microsoft Teams is far more than a meetings-and-email tool for corporate, and how it's quietly becoming the operating system for the people who actually run the store floor.

The conversation moves from the practical to the profound — from cutting a store walkthrough's documentation time in half with voice-based checklists, to giving every frontline worker a "digital identity," to the bigger truth underneath it all: as AI and agentic commerce reshape retail, the human connection on the floor becomes more valuable, not less. Tulsi's design philosophy says it best — use technology for the mechanics, but leave the meaning untouched, and create more space for it.

For any retail leader weighing how to bring AI and digital tools to their frontline without losing the human core of the work, this is a roadmap — and a reminder of why the people closest to the customer matter more than ever.

In this episode:

Why there's a massive "awareness gap" around frontline technology — and why many retailers already own the license
How frontline workers deliver some of the fastest, clearest ROI of any tech investment
The difference between deploying for big-box operations (inventory, labor) vs. luxury (the associate-customer relationship)
How voice is removing the "heads-down" drudgery of store walkthroughs and checklists
Why Teams acts as a platform that reduces the number of apps a frontline worker juggles — not adds to them
The link between giving managers time back and frontline retention, career conversations, and pride in the work
Where AI fits: handling the mechanics so humans can focus on judgment, connection, and meaning

Selling Without a Script — with Daria Tcherkachina

Season 3 · Episode 2

Tuesday, June 16, 2026 • Duration 32:41

The entire retail sales-training industry is built on scripts and closing techniques. Daria Tcherkachina threw both out — and built a career proving they were never the point.

In this episode, Daria and Ron make the case that customer service is the most underrated revenue strategy in retail, and that the human standing on your floor is the asset most businesses are quietly wasting.

Daria's 22 years span door-to-door sales, luxury floors at Harry Rosen, a bespoke suiting studio whose clients included Drake, and building Lighthouse Immersive's retail operation across 27 markets from scratch. She now runs PUBLC SERVICE.

What you'll hear:

Why curiosity — not closing — is the glue holding her five-element framework together (Purpose, Presence, Connection, Curiosity, Care)
Why "presence" is measurable, not a feeling: the sum of every operational decision made before the customer walks in
The closed loop that quietly kills sales: businesses underinvest in training, staff feel undervalued, customers feel nothing, numbers suffer — each side waiting for the other to move first
Her one Monday-morning shift for any leader: give your team individual purpose before every shift. "It costs nothing. It takes 60 seconds."

Find Daria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariatcherkachina/

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Why AI Is Making Human Selling More Valuable, Not Less

Season 3 · Episode 1

Tuesday, June 2, 2026 • Duration 28:41

The more we shop with algorithms and let AI agents shape our decisions, the more valuable one thing becomes: a human who actually knows how to sell. That is the thesis of Season 3 — and there is no better person to open the conversation than Ben Rodier.

Ben is the CEO and co-founder of FrontlineIQ.ai and a repeat entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience building sales technology, including his earlier company, Salesfloor. While many AI sales tools were designed for office-based B2B reps working from call transcripts, emails, and CRM data, FrontlineIQ was built for a different reality: B2C and field sellers who win or lose the customer in person, in real time.

In this conversation, Ron and Ben explore:

What the “coaching crisis” actually looks like on a Tuesday afternoon on a real sales floor.

Why the problem turned out to be far bigger than the category FrontlineIQ started in.

The honest version of where this technology works, where it does not, and what the skeptics get right.

What AI is revealing from real sales conversations about how top performers open differently than everyone else.

Whether the market is truly ready to pay a premium for human selling — or whether that idea is still wishful thinking.

This is a tactical, candid, and occasionally pointed conversation about the most human work left in business.

Disclosure: Ron recently joined FrontlineIQ as an advisor, which he discloses in the episode.

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How to Stand Out as a Candidate When Everyone Uses AI

Season 2 · Episode 21

Monday, May 4, 2026 • Duration 17:32

EPISODE 21 — How to Stand Out as a Candidate When Everyone Uses AI

Special Series: The Human Edge in the Job Market (Part 4 of 6)

In 2024, Insight Global surveyed over a thousand U.S. hiring managers and found that 88% can tell when a candidate is using AI in their application. One in five recruiters say they would reject a fully AI-generated resume or cover letter outright. And industry estimates suggest that somewhere between 40 and 80% of applicants in 2026 are leaning on AI to draft their resumes, cover letters, and interview answers.

The result: the rules of standing out have inverted. The thing that’s supposed to give you an edge — the AI polish, the optimization, the perfectly worded cover letter — is the same thing that’s tagging you as forgettable. Polish is the new generic.

In Part 4 of The Human Edge in the Job Market, Ron Thurston walks through three specific moments in a job search where humanity beats polish — and names the edge that lives inside each one. Because these are advantages you already have, built into how you’ve been working your whole career.

Place One: The Application — the edge is Specificity. The cover letter’s job is no longer to summarize a resume. It’s to prove a real human being lived this career. The exact stores. The exact week. The exact hours saved. Three sentences of that beats three paragraphs of optimized polish, every single time. Because no AI knew about the moment that actually mattered.

Place Two: The Conversation — the edge is Presence. Hiring managers are exhausted by perfect answers. What they remember is the candidate who paused before answering, who admitted uncertainty, who told a real story instead of running a STAR-method script. Stop preparing answers. Start preparing stories. Pick three to five real moments from your career and memorize the feeling, not the words. Let yourself be a person, not a performance.

Place Three: The Follow-Up — the edge is Generosity. The thank-you note is where almost no one stands out, which is exactly why it’s where you can. A real follow-up does three things: it references one specific thing the hiring manager said, it adds one thing you wished you’d said in the conversation, and it closes with a genuine offer to give more. Specific. Additive. Generous. In a market full of polish, that’s the rarest thing of all.

“If your resume looks like everyone else’s — you don’t have a resume problem. You have a voice problem. If your interviews are blending together in your own memory — you don’t have an interview problem. You have a story problem. If your follow-ups are getting no response — you don’t have a follow-up problem. You have a connection problem. And the fix in every one of those cases is the same. Be a person. On purpose. Out loud. With specifics.”

From Facts to Impact: The Art of Storytelling in Interviews

Season 2 · Episode 20

Thursday, April 30, 2026 • Duration 14:18

EPISODE 20 — From Facts to Impact: The Art of Storytelling in Interviews

Special Series: The Human Edge in the Job Market (Part 3 of 6)

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 surveyed over a thousand companies and found that 39% of workers’ core skills will change by 2030. But the skills employers say are most essential right now — analytical thinking, resilience, leadership and social influence, creative thinking, empathy and active listening — aren’t the technical credentials on a resume. They’re the things you’ve been quietly building for twenty or thirty years and calling “just what I do.”

In Part 3 of The Human Edge in the Job Market, Ron Thurston walks through four questions designed to turn a vague sense of “I did good work” into something you can actually say out loud.

These four questions were built for interviews — but they work anywhere you need to articulate what you actually contributed: a performance review, a quarterly check-in, or a moment of self-doubt at the kitchen table at the end of a long week. This episode is for anyone in transition. And it’s also for the listener who is currently employed, currently questioning whether their work has been seen.

Question #1 — Who is better at their job today because of time they spent with you? Not who you trained officially. Not who reported to you on an org chart. Who is genuinely more capable, more confident, more clear on who they are as a professional — because you were in their life? That’s leadership and social influence. It’s one of the skills the WEF identified as essential. And most people have been doing it for free, often without anyone noticing.

Question #2 — What problem did you solve that nobody asked you to solve? The hardest one to claim, because by definition nobody assigned it to you. But you saw it. You acted. Something got better. An employer can hire someone to do what they’re told. What they cannot easily hire is someone who notices what nobody else is noticing — and does something about it.

Question #3 — What did the team do differently because of the standard you set? Not the policy. Not the procedure. The standard. The way people showed up, talked to each other, treated the work. Somebody set that. In a lot of cases, that somebody was you.

“The market is full of people who can fill a role. What it cannot find enough of are people who show up with the kind of presence, judgment, and genuine investment in other people that you have been bringing to every room you’ve ever walked into. That is not a soft skill. That is the whole thing.”

Empowering Your Job Search: Three Essential Questions

Season 2 · Episode 19

Monday, April 27, 2026 • Duration 20:18

EPISODE 19 — Empowering Your Job Search: Three Essential Questions

Special Series: The Human Edge in the Job Market (Part 2 of 6)

Job applicants in 2025 were 12% less likely to reject a job offer than they were in 2023. People are taking jobs right now that — two years ago — they would have walked away from. Not because the jobs got better. Because the people got more scared.

In Part 2 of The Human Edge in the Job Market, Ron Thurston speaks directly to the listener who doesn't have a stack of offers in front of them right now — and walks through three big questions that protect you from the wrong yes, even when the market is pressuring you to settle.

This isn't a philosophy. It's protection. Three big questions for you. Five interview questions for them. And a 24-hour rule that stands between you and the wrong job.

Big Question #1 — What are my three non-negotiables? Not five. Not ten. Three. Preferences are the things you'd like. Values are the things you won't live without. When the offers are scarce, your non-negotiables are the only thing standing between you and a wrong yes. Ron explains why three is the number — and why five or ten gives you permission to trade.

Big Question #2 — What am I asking them? An interview is a two-way decision. The candidates who win offer after offer are the ones who walk in evaluating the company right back. Inside this question: five specific interview questions to carry into every interview from now on. Pick two or three. But know them. They shift the dynamic from candidate to peer.

Big Question #3 — Have I given myself permission to say no? Permission to say no is not the same thing as planning to say no. Most of the offers you get, you're going to take — that's fine, that's often the right answer. But you cannot say the right yes if you haven't given yourself permission to say no. Plus the 24-hour rule that protects you from a yes-by-default, and the kind, warm, professional no that keeps the bridge intact.

"Your standards are not the problem. Your standards are what will protect you when the wrong offer comes in dressed up like the right one."

The Three Edges You Already Have

Season 2 · Episode 18

Monday, April 20, 2026 • Duration 15:52

EPISODE 18 — The Three Edges You Already HaveSpecial Series: The Human Edge in the Job Market (Part 1 of 6)

Right now, more than 28 million people have the Open to Work banner on LinkedIn. If you're one of them — or you're thinking about turning it on — this episode is for you.

Over the next six episodes, Ron walks through the edges you already have in a job market being rebuilt around technology. Not tactical job-search tips. Not resume hacks. The advantages that didn't end when the role did — the things no algorithm can see, no title can capture, and no restructure can take from you.

In Part 1, the foundation: three Human Edges you already carry.

Edge #1 — Your Judgment. The pattern-recognition you've earned from doing the work. Analytical thinking, adaptability, and problem-solving are the top skills employers are hiring for in 2026 — and the #1 reason hires fail isn't technical ability. It's judgment.

Edge #2 — Your Relationships. Referred candidates are 4 to 10 times more likely to be hired than candidates who apply through job boards. Referrals make up only 7% of applicants — but 30–50% of hires. The job you get next is probably going to come from a conversation, not an application.

Edge #3 — Your Story. The through-line that makes every chapter of your career make sense. The single most persuasive thing you own — and the thing most candidates leave out.

Three edges. All yours. All already in you.

"The role ended. Your value didn't."

🎧 Subscribe for new episodes weekly

https://www.ronthurston.com/

📚 Ron's Books

Retail Pride: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1544509456 Human Pride: https://geni.us/humanpride

🔗 Sources & Stats Referenced

Follow Ron

The Retail Manager is the Moment.

Season 2 · Episode 17

Wednesday, April 15, 2026 • Duration 08:43

Episode Summary

Retail didn't have a middle management problem. It had a leadership investment problem — and solved it the fastest and worst way possible. In this episode, Ron breaks down what actually happens when you eliminate the manager: the floor walks stop, the conversations stop, and the people who make your strategy real disappear. Three human truths about retail, technology, and the people caught in between.

Three Human Truths

Retail: Flattening the org chart didn't create efficiency. It created silence. And silence doesn't mean alignment — it means something is breaking.

Technology: We didn't replace managers with AI. We replaced judgment with dashboards — and hoped compliance would feel like leadership. It doesn't.

People: Forty-four percent of retail workers are planning to leave. Not because of pay. Because of leadership. They're not asking for more money — they're asking to be known.

Research & SourcesBloomberg / Live Data Technologies — Middle Manager Layoffs

Middle managers made up one-third of all layoffs in 2023 — up from 20% in 2018. This analysis was conducted by Live Data Technologies for Bloomberg.

Bloomberg: Middle Manager Jobs Make Up 30% of White Collar Layoffs

CNBC: Middle Managers Are Getting Laid Off — But Their Role Is 'More Important Than Ever'

Korn Ferry — Workforce 2025: Power Shifts

Korn Ferry's annual survey of 15,000 professionals worldwide found that 41% of employees say their organization has slashed management layers. 40% of U.S. employees say they feel a lack of direction at work as a result. More than a third feel directionless without a manager.

Gartner — AI & Middle Management ProjectionMcKinsey — The Manager Relationship & Frontline SatisfactionMcKinsey / Business of Fashion — Retail Worker AttritionRon's BooksSubscribe & ConnectGet new episodes delivered twice a week: