Walmart and McDonalds defend dynamic pricing.

0:00College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwicker call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Nicky Glazer, this stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day, so... November 19th, Yamabah Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrative. Tickets on sale now at Yamabah Theater.com. Don't miss Nicky Glazer. Yamabah Theater. Brussels clean up nicely at Sweet Green. Maple glazed, roasted, and edges perfectly caramelized.

1:08Sweet Green's fall harvest is back on the menu, and the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured. You know what to do. Order on the Sweet Green app. You pull into a drive-through. It is raining heavily. Traffic on the adjacent street is practically crawling, and the line of cars in front of you is moving slowly. You order your usual burger, hand over your card, and grab your food. What you do not know is that a supercomputer just checked the local weather API, analyzed the traffic congestion in your specific neighborhood, looked at the length of the line, and realized you are entirely too tired and too trapped to drive away. So they are... they are factoring in your exhaustion level, essentially. Basically, yeah. Because of those specific variables, that system just charged you 15 cents more than the person who bought the exact same burger an hour ago when the sun was shining. A major fast food algorithm, specifically the McDonald's AI tool, is currently operating across 14,000 locations,

2:12running real-time calculations to estimate exactly how much you are willing to spend in any given moment. I mean, you look at that hyper-aggressive level of localized extraction, and it sits in direct contrast to what is happening over in the grocery sector right now. The CEO of a huge grocery retailer just put out this very deliberate letter to their customers. The core promise is that they will strictly price the product not the person. All right, they are categorically stating that your income or your shopping history or local weather patterns will never be used to alter the price of basic staples. But at the exact same moment they are making that promise. This company is actively rolling out remote control digital shelf labels across 2,300 of their stores. They own the patents for the remote control technology, and they are physically installing the infrastructure required to change prices instantly, hour by hour, without a human being ever touching a piece of paper. Which is fascinating because the physical hardware they are bolting to the aisles is identical to the hardware you would need to run the exact kind of dynamic algorithm driven pricing model that their CEO is publicly rejecting.

3:18Yeah, you have this intense tension right now. On one side, the fast food industry is openly pushing the technological boundary of how much localized margin they can extract. And on the other side, the dominant player in grocery is spending massive amounts of capital to physically build the capability for instant price changes. All while promising you, they will never actually use that capability to target you. We are looking at a situation where the technological capability to maximize corporate profit has entirely outpaced the traditional social contract of retail. Right. It forces a very specific question. When technology reaches the point where it can calculate the absolute maximum your wallet can handle on a random Tuesday afternoon, where is the line between running a smart business and actively optimizing against your own customers. If you're not subscribed yet, take a second and hit follow on whatever podcast app you're using. It helps us keep making this. We appreciate you being here. So looking at the mechanics of how this McDonald's AI operates, it really shows how far we have moved from traditional pricing. It is pulling in just an immense amount of real time data streams.

4:27Right. It is not just looking at what sold yesterday. Exactly. We are talking about micro local weather patterns, hyper specific neighborhood purchasing histories and local competitor pricing. The system is designed to constantly evaluate the friction point of a transaction. The AI is specifically trying to locate the exact point where a customer is still willing to say yes, but just barely. Which is such a wild way to do business. It is. It monitors demand at a granular block by block level that effectively strips away the entire concept of a uniform national or even regional menu price. Well, because businesses have always tried to maximize profit, you know, but throwing an AI of this caliber into the mix fundamentally shifts the nature of the relationship between the buyer and the seller. The old business question was always based on cost. What should this burger cost? You calculated the cost of the beef, the bun, the labor, you factored in the overhead for the building, you added a reasonable profit margin, and that number became the price.

5:30Sure. Standard accounting. Right. But the AI is asking an entirely different question. It asks, how much can this particular neighborhood tolerate right now? Which shifts the dynamic from a simple transaction into like an adversarial calculation. It is not trying to find a fair market value based on goods and services. It is trying to find your breaking point. If you think about the concept of elasticity of demand, the AI is treating the customer like a rubber band. That is a good way to put it. It wants to know exactly how far can stretch the price before the rubber band snaps and the customer just drives away. By continuously testing different price points across thousands of separate nodes, the system learns exactly how much margin can be extracted from a specific neighborhood before the transaction volume begins to drop. And that completely ignores the emotional aspect of food. Oh, totally. I mean, food is fundamentally about comfort, routine, and trust.

6:31Finding honest value for your money is why people stay loyal to a specific brand for years. People integrate these restaurants into their daily routines. They stop there after a long shift at work, they grab food for their kids after practice. It is supposed to be a reliable, known quantity. College football is back. So Hilton called on me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwicker call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Nicky Glazer, this stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day. So... November 19th, Yamavath Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bake oven.

7:37I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrowness. Tickets on sale now at Yamavathether.com. Don't miss Nicky Glazer. Yamavath Theater. Brussels clean up nicely at sweet green. Maple glazed, roasted and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweet greens fall harvest is back on the menu. And the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured. You know what to do. Order on the Sweet Green app. Right, you expect the burger to cost what the burger cost last week. Exactly. When an algorithm begins quietly turning the dials on that experience, testing to see if it can squeeze an extra quarter out of a tired parent on a Tuesday night, it fractures that trust. The sheer volume of data required to maintain that system is staggering too. It requires constant feeding to keep the accuracy up, pulling in everything from local event schedules to regional traffic patterns. But the risk they are taking involves treating human loyalty like a cold math equation.

8:39Which you cannot really do. You cannot mathematically model the feeling a customer gets when they realize the store down the street charges 50 cents less for the exact same item. Simply because the algorithm determined their specific neighborhood has a slightly higher tolerance for price hikes. The math is going to show a short term bump in revenue. Absolutely. But the equation fails to account for the silent attrition of customers who just slowly decide to go somewhere else. Yeah, and AI can calculate the maximum possible profit down to the decimal point. But it completely fails to calculate the heartbreak of a customer feeling taken advantage of. And that friction is not just being felt by the person buying the food. It is actively being felt by the people running the physical stores. The local operators. Yeah. Right. The franchisees are the ones who have to stand across the counter and deal with the immediate human fallout of a digital calculation made by a server farm three states away. And the franchisees are actively reporting that the AI has aggravated price differences among nearby stores. You have independent operators within the same general area seeing their recommended prices diverge wildly based on the algorithms hyper local analysis.

9:47And these franchisees are feeling immense pressure from corporate headquarters to adopt this specific AI tool. Which is causing a lot of legal headaches. Oh, massive headaches. It is triggering serious antitrust and collusion scrutiny because you have neighboring stores which are technically independent businesses being fed coordinated pricing strategies from a centralized corporate brain. Yeah. The corporate entity is optimizing for top line revenue across all 14,000 stores. While the local owner is just trying to manage the relationship with a person who walks through their door every morning. The corporate defense here is interesting actually. You look at the statements from executive John banner. He insists that AI does not set menu prices make automatic changes or target individuals. The official stance is that the tools merely provide recommendations based on massive data sets. And the franchisees always make the final pricing decisions based on their local market conditions. They are leaning really hard on that word recommendation. Exactly. They are relying heavily on the technical distinction between a mandatory corporate mandate and a highly suggested recommendation.

10:54The messaging is designed to create a buffer of plausible deniability. They claim the AI is just there to help run successful businesses completely sidestepping the operational pressure placed on an owner to conform to the algorithm. The tension in that corporate defense is structural. If a headquarters provides an incredibly sophisticated AI pricing recommendation system backed by their entire data analytics department. Does a franchisee truly have a choice but to follow it? Probably not. Right. Because the corporate office controls the supply chain, the marketing, the brand health. If an operator decides to manually override the AI to keep prices lower for their regulars and their profit margins dip below the algorithmic projection. They have to defend that manual decision to corporate leadership, which is a terrible position to be in. It is the recommendation functions as a soft mandate. The actual pricing leverage is steadily migrating to the corporate servers, even if the local owner is the one physically pressing the button to accept the price. You see this dynamic reflecting wider shifts across the tech industry right now.

11:57The major AI company's safety leader just stepped down recently and they issued a very clear warning about unchecked systems. Yeah, I remember reading about that. The core issue they highlighted is that when algorithms drive decisions, human oversight often becomes secondary. The human just becomes a rubber stamp on a process they no longer fully comprehend. The speed in the complexity of the systems just outpaced the human ability to meaningfully intervene. The local operators are increasingly managed by the tool rather than managing the tool themselves. So while one brand is aggressively defending its use of AI pricing behind closed doors and leaning on technicalities, you have Walmart attempting to loudly reject the entire concept in public. John Furner's letter to customers establishes very explicit guardrails. It was a very direct letter. It was. It states clearly that income, shopping history, urgency and the weather will not change your price. They are actively rejecting the concept of surge pricing on basic staples based on your zip code.

13:00Both the strategies are entirely preemptive. The CEOs during a hard line in the sand attempted to define the boundaries of acceptable retail technology before consumer panic forces their hand. And you have to look at the physical context that forced that letter into existence in the first place. Consumers are watching Walmart roll out electronic digital shelf labels across thousands of stores. These are not just simple LCD screens showing a static number. They are networked devices. Right. They communicate via wireless nodes installed in the store's ceilings. The patents for the remote control technology show exactly where the technical capability is heading. It is essentially turning the grocery store shelf into a stock market ticker. Exactly. The infrastructure for instant hour by hour price changes is being bolted to the shelves right now. People see a blinking digital tag where a paper label used to be and they immediately connect the dots. They know a digital tag is a dynamic tag because the hardware screams optimization. So the public relations arm has to scream stability.

14:00The technical capability to surge price a gallon of milk is fully installed and operational. That makes the promise not to use it a deliberate strategic choice. Walmart's core business model is everyday low price. Which is basically their entire identity. It is. That model is essentially their only moat against competitors like Amazon. Amazon operates in a constantly fluctuating highly dynamic pricing environment. The prices in your online cart can change while you are just looking at them. Walmart's counter strategy relies entirely on the fact that everyone walking into a physical store sees the exact same shelf tag at the exact same moment. The psychological weight of the everyday low price model depends completely on certainty. The customer needs to believe that the price they see is the baseline, the absolute floor of the market. They do not want to negotiate. They do not want to check an app to see if the price is better. They do not want to wait for a flash sale. They just want to buy their gross reason leaf. Right. If a physical retailer starts tweaking the price of eggs dynamically based on local inventory algorithms, they shatter that certainty.

15:07They would be sacrificing their primary competitive advantage for a short term margin boost. The promise to price the product and not the person is the fundamental architecture of their brand identity. And by drawing this line publicly, Furner is trying to kill consumer fear before it spreads. But he is also forcing competitors like Kroger and Albert Sons into a very uncomfortable position. Oh, absolutely. Those competitors now have to state their own pricing boundaries. If a rival grocer is quietly experimenting with dynamic pricing models to improve their margins, this public declaration forces them to either match the promise and kill their internal pilot programs or remain silent and allow consumers to assume the worst. It is a highly aggressive offensive maneuver disguised as a consumer protection pledge. Walmart is leveraging its massive scale to set the ethical standard for the entire industry. They know full well that smaller competitors might actually need dynamic pricing to survive the margin pressure of modern retail.

16:08Yeah, grocery margins are famously razor thin. Right. So by establishing the baseline of acceptable behavior, they are weaponizing trust. They make it incredibly difficult for anyone else in the grocery sector to utilize the technology without looking exploitative. But the line between what is acceptable and what is exploitative is incredibly thin. We really have to look at the difference between dynamic pricing and personalized pricing because the technical infrastructure required for both is identical. Exactly the same hardware. Yeah. Adjusting digital prices constantly based on competitor pricing, inventory levels, and broad demand signals is dynamic pricing. The retailer looks at the broader market and adjusts the number on the shelf for everyone. Adjusting prices based on an individual's willingness to pay crosses the line into personalized pricing. Which is where it gets creepy. Very. Personalized pricing looks at your specific data, your history, your habits, your location, and generates a price meant only for you. The digital shelf label does not care if the price update came from a broad inventory algorithm or a highly targeted personalized extraction model.

17:12It just displays the number. Right. The only thing separating a dynamic inventory adjustment from a personalized price gouge is the internal policy of the company running the servers. Which brings up a very strange double standard and consumer behavior, honestly. We accept in dynamic and personalized pricing on hotel rooms and concert tickets years ago. Oh, for sure. If you book a flight to Vegas, you sit next to someone on the airplane and you know for a fact they paid a different price for their ticket. You book a hotel and you expect the rate to fluctuate based on the day of the week and how far in advance you booked. We have internalized the logic of airline pricing and yield management for travel and entertainment. We just accept it as normal. We do. So why is regulation landing on the grocery aisle first? Why do people lose their minds over a digital price tag on a carton of eggs? Well, the distinction lies entirely in the nature of the product. Entertainment and travel are discretionary. You can choose not to go to the concert. You can choose to skip the vacation.

18:12You cannot choose not to eat. That is a very fair point. Essential food items carry a moral weight that airline seats simply do not. When a retailer applies airline style yield management to a loaf of bread, it triggers a visceral survival level rejection. The elasticity of demand for basic sustenance is low. Consumers feel trapped by the algorithm rather than simply participating in a market. Yeah. The grocery store is viewed as a public utility. And applying aggressive optimization to a utility feels inherently predatory to a buyer. And consumers will completely reject products when they feel the value equation is off. Just look at the recent failure of a $499 toothbrush from Dyson. I remember seeing that when it launched. The company attempted to extract a massive margin by premiumizing an everyday item. They added app connectivity and engineered highly complex devices. But they failed to deliver reciprocal value that justify the cost.

19:12A $500 toothbrush needs to offer an experience that fundamentally alters your morning routine. Otherwise, it's just a cash grab. When a brand tries to extract too much margin without providing a corresponding leap in utility, consumers simply walk away. The market violently rex the pricing strategy. Cos football is back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwick up call it $55.55. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Nicky Glazer, this stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day. So... November 19th, Yamavath Theater.

20:14No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrowness. Tickets on sale now at Yamavathether.com. Don't miss Nicky Glazer. Yamavath Theater. Brussels clean up nicely at Sweet Green. Maple glazed, roasted and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweet Green's fall harvest is back on the menu. And the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured. You know what to do. Order on the Sweet Green app. And that exact same principle applies to algorithmic pricing in retail. The data might tell the retailer that a specific customer can mathematically afford a 10% increase on their weekly grocery bill. But if the customer perceives that increase as a manipulation rather than a reflection of true market value, the mathematical calculation becomes totally irrelevant. They will just leave.

21:15Exactly. The customer will alter their behavior. They will switch to a discount grocer or abandon the brand entirely. The algorithm often fails to account for the breaking point of consumer goodwill. Financial tolerance and emotional tolerance are two very different metrics. Loyalty programs fit right into the center of this tension too. Think about how a digital coupon works. A voucher picked from your purchase history is technically a personalized price. Wait, how so? Well, if you always buy a specific brand of coffee, and the grocery app sends you a dollar off coupon for that exact coffee, the algorithm has successfully personalized your pricing. Oh, I see what you mean. Right. But nobody complains when a retailer lowers a price for a loyal customer. The fear is purely about being singled out to pay more. The psychology of pricing is deeply rooted in loss of version. Gaining a personalized discount feels like a reward for good behavior. Facing a personalized price increase feels like a penalty for existing. But the data mechanisms driving both outcomes are exactly the same.

22:18100%. The algorithm identifies your habits and adjusts the financial equation accordingly. Retailers are terrified of the backlash that occurs the moment a customer realizes their loyalty profile is being used to find their maximum pain point rather than their optimal discount. But a retailer does not necessarily need to raise the price of an item to extract more money from a customer. They can just use an algorithm to change what the customer sees. Exactly. You look at Walmart's AI shopping assistance Sparky. Customers using this AI assistance spend 40% more per order than those who do not use the tool. 40% is a huge jump. That is a staggering premium. The assistant is designed to streamline the digital shopping experience, allowing customers to build baskets quickly using voice commands or automated suggestions. But a 40% increase indicates that the tool is doing much more than simply facilitating a transaction. It has to be. It is actively reshaping the transaction to benefit the retailer's bottom line.

23:18The AI acts as a digital concierge, but the concierge is employed by the store, not the shopper. We really have to analyze exactly where that 40% premium is coming from. It is not just from better product recommendations that magically align with what the customer actually wants. It comes from behavioral nudges, substitution suggestions, and cart optimization that pushes people toward higher margin items without them ever realizing a shift happened. Right. Think about choice architecture. In a physical store, choice architecture is how they arrange the shelves. You know, they put the expensive, the high margin items right at eye level, and then they hide the cheap store brand on the bottom shelf where you have to stoop down to find it. The AI does the exact same thing digitally, but it is infinitely more effective. If you ask the AI assistant to add butter to your cart, it has to decide which butter to add. It can choose the low margin store brand, or it can choose the high margin premium brand.

24:18And it chooses the premium one. The AI gently guides the shopper toward the more profitable outcome. It might suggest a complimentary item that pairs well with what you just bought, focusing entirely on high margin additions. The customer feels like they are having a highly personalized, efficient shopping experience, completely unaware that the invisible hand of the algorithm is carefully constructing a basket designed to maximize the retailer's profit yield. So the nudges are frictionless, making the extraction of that extra 40% feel completely natural. And the loophole here is brilliant from a corporate perspective. A company does not need to charge you more for the same gallon of milk. They just use the AI to make sure you never see the cheaper brand that used to be your first choice. Right. They hide it. Right. So they adhere strictly to the public promise of pricing the product and not the person. So the base price of the cheap milk remains identical for everybody. But the AI personalizes the visibility of the products.

25:18By bearing the cheaper option beneath layers of sponsored products and algorithmic recommendations, the retailer effectively forces the customer to choose the higher priced item simply out of convenience or fatigue. The manipulation happens in the search results, not on the price tag. Which is very clever. It is. This allows the company to publicly champion their commitment to transparent pricing while simultaneously using highly advanced machine learning models to obscure the actual value options available to the consumer. The digital shelf is infinitely malleable and the algorithm acts as the ultimate gig keeper. It curates a reality that mathematically favors the house. Which forces you to ask if this violates the spirit of the promise to price the product and not the person. If an AI uses what you share to nudge your behavior, it is absolutely a form of personalization that extracts more money. Without a doubt. The technicality of keeping the base price static provides legal cover, but the behavioral outcome is identical to search pricing.

26:20Tech companies are constantly adjusting these exact boundaries around data access right now. Apple is currently planning to patch a privacy loophole against AI agents, which really highlights just how much unseen data access these assistants truly have. These AI agents scrape data across apps, analyzing habits and preferences to build incredibly detailed consumer profiles. So they know everything you are doing pretty much when an AI assistant has access to that level of granular behavioral data. It can predict exactly which nudges will work on which specific Tuesday. The battle over data privacy is directly tied to the battle over algorithmic retail extraction. The more data the assistant has, the more effectively it can hide the cheap milk and suggest the premium alternative. But proving an AI is systemically hiding cheaper options is almost impossible for an outside observer. You cannot easily audit a personalized search result because it only exists for that specific user in that specific millisecond. It's a black box.

27:20Exactly. Which is exactly why regulators are stepping in to draw hard lines on the sand. The incoming legislation reflects a growing governmental anxiety over these algorithmic black boxes. Maryland's ban on personalized pricing for large food retailers has already taken effect. Connecticut and New Jersey have outright bands coming up very shortly. New York's ban is currently waiting on the governor's desk. And at the federal level, the FTC is proposing rules to ask retailers to explicitly disclose any use of personalized pricing. So it's a massive regulatory wave. It is. And the legislative wave is highly targeted at the grocery sector, reflecting that same visceral reaction we discussed earlier regarding essential food items. State governments are looking at the technical capabilities being installed by major retailers and deciding they cannot wait for the market to self-regulate. Because it won't. Right. They are attempting to codify the traditional social contract of retail into law. They are legally mandating that a price must be a static number offered equally to all citizens rather than a dynamic variable calculated by a server farm.

28:24But if you look closely, most of Walmart's promise actually goes further than what current law requires. State laws are drawing the line exactly at the fear of being singled out to pay more. They're focused on preventing discriminatory pricing based on protected classes or invasive behavioral profiling. All right, the real heavy stuff. Yeah. But Walmart's pledge to avoid adjusting prices based on weather or local urgency. Like it actually, it like exceeds those specific legal mandates. So they are, they're engaging in preemptive compliance, essentially building like this regulatory moat around our business model. By setting their internal policies stricter than the upcoming state laws, they avoid the costly and embarrassing price. So they're costly and embarrassing process of untangling their algorithms later. It serves as a massive strategic advantage. Oh, it's incredibly smart. If Walmart operates well within the bounds of the new laws, but their competitors rely on the exact algorithmic practices being banned, those competitors will face severe operational disruptions. The legislation will seemingly aimed at restricting retailers actually entrench the position of the retailer whose core business model already relies on consistent non-personalized pricing.

29:34We should consider the alternative strategies to AI pricing too, because not everyone is rushing toward algorithmic extraction. Instead of optimizing the check, how do restaurants and retailers actually earn the traffic in the first place? There are creative physical retail concepts emerging that reject the extraction model entirely. You look at things like a new combination bar supermarket. It sounds strange at first, but the strategy is brilliant. Yeah, they're trying to drive organic foot traffic by creating a physical destination, an experience that cannot be replicated online or optimized by an AI card assistant. Exactly. You go to bi-growseries, but you stay to have a drink, interact with neighbors, and spend time in the physical space. The business model relies on the gravity of the experience rather than the friction of the transaction. They aren't using a supercomputer to squeeze extra of 40 cents out of your produce purchase. They're creating an environment where you willingly choose to spend an extra $10 because you're enjoying the atmosphere. It is a return to hospitality as a growth driver, treating the physical store as a community hub rather than just a localized distribution node for an algorithm.

30:41And connecting this back to transparency, you see a parallel movement across different sectors of the economy. One major tech company recently vowed to ditch NDAs for data center buildouts in a push for absolute transparency, which is a huge shift. Historically, these data centers, the exact facilities powering these complex pricing algorithms were built in total secret. They used shell companies to hide the massive power and water requirements from the local communities. Right. The pushback became so severe that the company realized secrecy was a liability. Consumers and workers are actively demanding a clear understanding of how tools are used and just as importantly, how they are not used. College football is back. So, Hilton called on me. The superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwick up call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it!

31:43When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Nicky Glazer, this stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day. So... November 19th, Yamavath Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrative. Tickets on sale now at Yamavath Theater.com. Don't miss Nicky Glazer. Yamavath Theater. Fall has never looked or tasted this good. Sweet Greens Fall Harvest Menu is back. With seasonal favorites, dress to impress and made to be devoured. Warm roasted sweet potatoes, crisp apples, maple glazed Brussels, and crave worthy flavors in the autumn harvest bowl, maple glazed salmon plate, and roasted bacon-bressel-side. The season's most desirable menu has returned to sweet green.

32:46Featuring falls best dressed. Make your move. Order on the sweet green app. The black box era of corporate behavior is facing immense friction. People want to see the wiring. Whether it is a community demanding to know how much water and AI data center will consume or a shopper demanding to know why their digital cart total jumped 20%, the underlying desire is exactly the same. Yeah, people don't want to be left in the dark. The public is rejecting the asymmetry of information. They want the algorithm pulled out of the shadows and placed on the table where everyone can see the math. As retail becomes aggressively more data-driven, the basic fundamentals, delivering value, being consistent, and earning trust become even more critical. Technology can certainly optimize a transaction down to the microcent, but if customers feel you are optimizing against them, that trust evaporates instantly. It takes years to build in a second brick. Exactly. A brand can spend decades building a reputation for fairness.

33:47Only to watch it collapse the moment a customer realizes the price tag is actively negotiating against them. So as retail becomes more data-driven, the basic fundamentals, delivering value, being consistent, and earning trust become even more critical. Technology can optimize a transaction, but if customers feel you are optimizing against them, that trust evaporates instantly. Which leaves you wondering, if algorithms continue to test exactly how much they can make us pay, will consumers eventually seek out strictly human analog businesses just to avoid the math equation entirely? If you're not subscribed yet, take a second and hit follow on whatever app you're using. It helps us keep making this. We appreciate you being here. Also check out our YouTube channel for more business and tech updates. There's a link in the description.