🕔 Fast Five | McDonald’s Supersizes Its Ads, Walmart Lights Up & DoorDash Widens Its Mall Base

Hello Omni Talk Fans! After last week’s solo show, which my wife tells me I recorded with way too much caffeine in my system, I called in reinforcements.

This week’s Fast Five features my good friend Richard McKenzie in the guest hosting chair for the first time. Richard is the former Chief Commercial Officer at Ocado, the former CEO of Veloq, and a former senior advisor to McKinsey (no relation). He also prepped for the show by training an AI to talk like me and argue with him all week.

Nobody has ever told me that before, and I hope it was as good for him as it was for me 🙂

Here’s a taste of what we discussed this week:

• McDonald’s selling ads at the drive-thru — Richard calls it a smart, low-cost trial but is “pretty damn skeptical” about how far it gets. I actually defend McDonald’s here, and explain why that $1 billion goal can’t possibly be coming from menu boards alone.
• Sephora coming to 100 M&S stores — Richard thinks it has a better shot than its American cousins, then turned the tables and asked me whether M&S learns the business and kicks Sephora out in five years. Oh, and news of the Boots sale broke while we were recording.
• DoorDash’s “mall in your pocket” — Richard buys it as the “emergency mall in your pocket.” I think DoorDash is the sleeping giant of retail, and I’ll tell you exactly why I’d be scared as hell if I were Amazon.
• Walmart’s light-up shelf labels — I asked Richard to rank Shop to Light, Pick to Light, and Stock to Light by value. His answer was not the one I was going to give, and he’s right.
• IKEA closing three plan and order stores — I asked Richard, aka the best logistics mind I know, how hard this concept is to pull off. His answer: “I’m very glad I’m not running it.

There’s all that, plus the single greatest anecdote in the show’s lightning round history as Richard recants a story of an IKEA assembly man propositioning his wife (while he was in the house!)

Listen to This Week’s Fast Five Podcast

Be careful out there,

— Chris and the entire Omni Talk team

P.S. Of all the inventions of the last 100 years, the dry erase board has to be the most remarkable.