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We ranked ten retailers live on the 300th Watson Weekly Weekend show, S down to C. The grades didn't sort by revenue or by margin. They sorted by whether a customer can still say what the store is for.

Alo Yoga got an S. I was a hater for about two years, and then I walked King Street in Charleston and found Alo sitting between Skims and Gucci. That's the category it plays in now. An LA yoga label with stores in London and Korea and revenue the company puts in the billions. It has roughly a hundred doors, which isn't many, and the experience holds up partly because of that. The open question is what the next hundred do to it.

Walmart got the other S and it wasn't a hard call. Ads, marketplace, and membership are all growing faster than the retail business underneath them. Four years ago I was on this show asking why Walmart Plus existed at all. It answered that. The consumer trading down gives them a tailwind on top of everything else.

Lululemon is a B, and the problem is on the sales floor. Walk in and there are eight pairs of black pants with no way to tell what separates them. The associates don't know either. They'll tell you which ones they personally like, which is not the same thing. Alo has taken the younger customer and the moms are still there, so the revenue hasn't broken. Gross margin is still somewhere near 58%.

Target went to C. Out of stocks, a rough back to school, no permanent CMO for something like two years. Management has said out loud that the company has problems, which is a start. Target is also insular in a way that makes hiring outside talent into Minneapolis hard, and that's the part I'd watch over the next four quarters.

Dick's is an A, with a hall pass on Foot Locker. House of Sport is a real format and they scaled it, which most retailers can no longer do. Foot Locker is anchored in malls, serves a different customer, and lost the Nike product that made it matter in the first place. That's a multi-year fix at best.

Nordstrom, B. The Rack is the growth engine. The full-line stores have drifted from the service standard the brand was built on. I shopped there four times in two weeks and the associate came out from behind the register maybe half the time.

Sephora took an A. It rewrote the department store beauty counter, and the loyalty program is the one people actually teach in school. Amazon got an A too, though mostly on the businesses that aren't retail. Whole Foods came in at B, which is more about Amazon not wrecking it than anything Whole Foods has done lately. The stores are still busy. I still can't work out whether checkout wants my palm, the app or something else.

The B and C tier isn't a financial problem. Lululemon has the margin and Target has the scale. What both have lost is a customer who can describe the store in one sentence. Whether that gets fixed by a merchant or by a CEO, I don't know. We'll rank them again next year.

Sur La Table launched a peer to peer resale marketplace on Tuesday. It's called Second Servings, US only, with Archive running the backend including payments, logistics, and customer support. Sellers ship kitchenware in on prepaid labels and pick between 70% of the sale price in cash and 100% in Sur La Table credit.

Most sellers will take the credit. Thirty points is a lot to leave behind, and credit costs the retailer less than the promotion it would otherwise run to pull the same order in.

The cannibalization math is what I can't work out. Apparel resale holds up partly because clothes go out of style before they wear out, so a resold jacket isn't competing with this season's version. Cookware doesn't behave that way. A Le Creuset braiser from 2006 cooks the same as the one on the shelf, and Archive's Smart Pricing is built to walk listings down toward 30% under suggested retail.

Marquee Brands and CSC Generation bought Sur La Table out of bankruptcy in 2020 for $88.9M. Programs get judged on contribution under that kind of ownership. Whether the credit actually returns to full price carts is the one number nobody publishes.

BFCM prep is underway, and winning peak season this year comes down to unified data, smart design, and seamless customer experiences.

We’ve teamed up with Nosto, Klaviyo, Pattern, Marine Layer, Feefo, iAdvize, and moderator Rick Watson to bring you an exclusive 3-part series: The High-Growth Shopify Playbook.

The Episode Lineup: