The Watson Weekly Weekend edition is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands.

I had a conversation with Mike Hogenmiller, who's spent 40+ years in home improvement retail, and walked away with three things I keep thinking about. None of them are new ideas. All of them are getting forgotten in real time.

Most retailers still don't get it. In 2001, Home Depot bought a small Baton Rouge, LA wholesale distributor called Your Other Warehouse. At the time, that distributor was Amazon's biggest and most profitable home-improvement supplier. Depot then stopped opening new stores, rebuilt their supply chain from prepaid-direct-to-store to collect freight, saved hundreds of millions, and put 90% of their customers within one-day delivery.

Then-CEO Craig Menear refused to call any of it eCommerce. He called it commerce. The customer decides what they buy, when, where, and how it shows up. Everything else follows.

Twenty-five years later, I still see brands obsessing over channel P&Ls instead of customer P&Ls. Mike's framing of Depot's priority order is the cleanest version of this I've heard: customers, associates, suppliers, investors. In that order. Most retailers today have rearranged the list to suit themselves and wonder why nothing works.

Mike's line on this is sharp. Walmart has a culture the founders and the customers won't let them release. Target released theirs 15-20 years ago. You can feel both when you walk in.

The detail that stuck with me was Sprouts. 450 stores, double-digit growth, then comps drop to 5.9% in a quarter. On the Q3 earnings call, the CEO, CFO, and COO all showed up. No merchant on the line. None.

You can tell a lot about a retailer by who they put on an earnings call. If there's no merchant in the room, the merchandising drifts, and the value proposition follows. Target's empty endcaps and one-or-two-of-everything Magnolia Home displays are the same disease in a different store.

Most don't know it yet. This is the part of the conversation I want every founder I work with to hear.

eCommerce strategy is "add every SKU you can find." Brick-and-mortar strategy is the opposite. Four walls. Finite SKU count. Managed financial structure. Categories built on purpose, not by long-tail accident. Mike calls out Wayfair specifically: no team building the brick-and-mortar platform, no long-term strategy, just an eCommerce playbook ported into physical space.

His line was blunt. An eCommerce space does not make a brick-and-mortar space. He's right.

If you're a DTC brand thinking about wholesale or your own stores, the eCommerce muscle you built isn't the one you need next. Different talent, different financial discipline, different customer expectations. The companies that win at both build two operating models, not one with a coat of paint.

Mike calls himself the critic who irritates most people. We could use more of those.

Three takeaways, one underlying point: the customer hasn't gotten more confusing. The retailers have gotten more distracted.