Hello GrocerTalk listeners,
We’re back from Groceryshop 2026, and this week I’m joined by Jordan Berke, Founder & CEO of retail consultancy TOMORROW, for his first time on GrocerTalk. Jordan spent 15 years at Walmart, including leading digital and omnichannel for Sam’s Club and Walmart primarily in China, so there was plenty of experience to tap into for this week’s conversation.
And we covered a lot. Surveillance pricing legislation is gaining momentum, Tesco store associates are raising concerns about the operational realities of rapid delivery, AI hype is rapidly becoming reality, and Sam’s Club is giving 200,000 members a bigger voice in what it sells. But there was also one theme that kept coming up throughout our conversation: trust. Trust in pricing, trust in how retailers use customer data, trust between ecommerce teams and store associates, and, increasingly, trust as AI agents insert themselves into the shopping journey.
Here’s what caught my attention this week.
“Surveillance Pricing” Is Becoming a Very Real Retail Conversation
We started in Seattle, where the city has approved its Fair and Transparent Pricing policy to ban so-called “surveillance pricing,” preventing large grocery retailers from using sensitive personal information to determine the prices offered to individual shoppers. (Source) The debate also prompted Walmart CEO John Furner to lay out three principles that will guide Walmart’s use of AI and pricing technology, including commitments not to set different prices based on who a shopper is or the time of day and not to use shopping tools to differentiate prices. (Source)
Jordan actually sees this moment as providing some much-needed clarity for retailers. The grocery leaders TOMORROW works with aren’t trying to charge Ben Miller one shelf price and Jordan Berke another, but they do want to continue using loyalty programs, targeted discounts and electronic shelf labels to improve pricing and operations. For me, it all comes back to trust. Grocery retailers have a particularly sensitive relationship with their customers because they’re selling what people put into their bodies, and personalized shelf pricing could break that trust very quickly. Jordan also thought Furner’s speed and clarity in responding were notable, particularly as Walmart continues one of the industry’s most high-profile electronic shelf label rollouts.
Tesco Is Feeling the Realities of Rapid Delivery
Next we headed to the UK, where Tesco store employees have raised concerns about the operational impact of the retailer’s Uber Eats and Deliveroo partnerships. Employees described the additional picking and replenishment demands as disruptive to other store responsibilities, with one Tesco Extra manager saying staff are constantly picking orders and that the additional volume has taken over the store operation. (Source)
Jordan’s point was that we are now firmly in the on-demand grocery era, and stores are going to be critical to making same-hour delivery work. The challenge is ensuring that ecommerce growth doesn’t come at the expense of associates or the customer already standing in the aisle. As order volumes increase, grocers need to evolve from sales-floor picking toward dedicated picking areas and, eventually, more automated fulfillment models where the economics make sense. Jordan put it particularly well: as an omnichannel operator, your store associates are your armed forces. If stores aren’t equipped for the demand you’re sending their way, the ecommerce strategy and the store strategy quickly start working against each other.
AI Hype Is Rapidly Becoming AI Reality
Then we got into what was probably the biggest conversation coming out of Groceryshop. Instacart CEO Chris Rogers said AI will transform grocery more than any technology shift to date and argued that grocery could be transformed more by AI than any other retail category. (Source) Jordan strongly agreed with the first part, comparing the potential impact of AI with technologies like electricity, UPCs and supply chain automation because it won’t just change how consumers shop. It could change what it means to buy, plan, market, merchandise and operate as a grocer.
And we’re already starting to get some evidence that these tools can change shopping behavior. At Groceryshop, we heard retailers talk about stronger baskets among shoppers using AI assistants, and Jordan said that tracks with what TOMORROW is seeing. A good agentic shopping experience can act almost like a superhuman assistant walking through the store with you, helping you find products, answer questions and discover things you otherwise might have missed. There’s still plenty to learn about causation versus correlation, but it’s getting harder to dismiss all of this as AI hype.
Who Owns the Customer in an Agentic Commerce World?
That brought us to what Jordan calls the “$1 trillion question” in retail: who ultimately owns the customer relationship in an agentic commerce world? The rise of AI shopping agents has retailers thinking seriously about disintermediation, particularly as companies like Amazon, Meta and the major AI platforms experiment with how agents could fit into commerce. (Source)
Jordan’s advice is to keep your eyes open to the risk while controlling what you can control. Retailers need to create world-class agentic experiences of their own while also figuring out how to show up within the larger AI ecosystem without surrendering their identity or customer relationships. For me, it comes back to one of our universal rules of retail: no good ever comes from surrendering ownership of the customer. Retailers will need to make themselves discoverable wherever consumers choose to shop while being very deliberate about what they give up in return.
Sam’s Club Is Putting Its Members Into the Merchandising Conversation
Our final big story came from Sam’s Club, where Chief Merchandising Officer Myron Frazier revealed at Groceryshop that its Member’s Mark Community now includes more than 200,000 shoppers. Members can provide direct feedback on products and merchandising decisions, from new cookie flavors to the composition of a Thanksgiving meal, while their input is also influencing other parts of the Sam’s Club experience. (Source)
Jordan loved this one and gave us some interesting context from his time around the business. He said John Furner brought a strong focus on member feedback to Sam’s Club years ago, including displaying a ticker-like stream of feedback around the home office so merchants and other teams stayed close to what members were actually saying. The Member’s Mark Community feels like a scaled evolution of that philosophy. And I don’t think listening to 200,000 members undermines merchant decision-making. If anything, it gives merchants another powerful input, particularly in a club environment where every SKU has to work incredibly hard.
Then We Got to GrocerTalk Grab & Go
For this week’s Grab & Go, Jordan pointed to Kroger’s newly articulated AI strategy and, specifically, its idea of “grocery as a managed service,” where shoppers can decide how involved they want to be in the grocery shopping process while agentic experiences take on more of the work. He also highlighted reports of Amazon investing heavily in quick commerce in India. Jordan sees India as the tip of the spear for quick commerce, with lessons learned there potentially making their way into markets like the US and UK.
I threw two stories back at him. First, Instacart had a huge week of marketplace announcements at Groceryshop, but Dollar General joining the Instacart Marketplace nationwide with no price markups particularly caught my attention. I’m also keeping a close eye on the potential sale of Tesco’s Central European operations across Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic and the reported interest from some very intriguing potential buyers.
A Few Things Worth Checking Out From This Week’s Episode
Catch up on Omni Talk’s Groceryshop 2026 coverage, including conversations with some of the biggest names across grocery, retail, technology and CPG. We sat down with leaders from Kroger, Sam’s Club, Costco, Albertsons, Instacart, Albert Heijn, Danone and more from the Vusion podcast studio in Las Vegas. Watch the latest interviews and episodes across the Omni Talk LinkedIn page, podcast channels and YouTube.
And if there’s one thing I took away from my conversation with Jordan, it’s that many of the grocery industry’s biggest technology conversations are quickly becoming operating conversations. The questions around AI, rapid delivery and pricing aren’t just about what the technology can do anymore. They’re about how retailers actually deploy it, how shoppers respond to it and, most importantly, whether they maintain trust along the way.
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Be careful out there,
Ben and the entire Omni Talk Team
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Omni Talk® is the retail blog for retailers, written by retailers. Chris Walton founded Omni Talk® in 2017 and have quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in retail.