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I think I've found where the agentic fog comes from. It's in Huntington Beach, at Retail Club.

At Shoptalk I said the industry was talking about agents in a way that made it hard to see anything clearly. Everyone had an agent story, and very few people could tell you what the agent actually did or how a retailer would know it was working. I came out here hoping some of that had cleared, and most of the people I've talked to are still in the cloud.

It's hot out here, and lunch has been small portions from a few food trucks. On the show floor, Amazon has the same payments booth it has run at these events for years, except this year the sign says Amazon Agentic Payments. As far as I can tell the pitch underneath hasn't changed much. That would be easier to ignore if Amazon weren't putting so much effort into keeping agents off its own site.

This week it blocked Meta's Muse agent from Amazon.com. Meta launched Muse on September 8. On Sunday the 20th, after Meta turned down a request to take Amazon out of the product, Amazon cut it off, and anyone who tries to shop Amazon through Muse now gets a pop-up saying the agent violates Amazon's terms. Amazon says any app buying on a customer's behalf should operate in the open and respect a store's decision about whether to take part.

I'd agree with that if Amazon held itself to it. Its own Buy for Me agent goes to other retailers' websites and completes purchases for Amazon shoppers, and those retailers weren't asked either. Muse is the latest in a series that includes last year's lawsuit against Perplexity over Comet and moves against shopping agents from OpenAI and Google. Amazon made more than $68 billion in advertising last year. That money depends on people browsing Amazon's pages and seeing sponsored listings, which an agent shopping on your behalf doesn't do.

So the pitch at this booth is that the company working hardest to keep other people's agents off its store should run payments when agents shop at yours. I don't buy it, because a retailer's agent strategy depends on outside agents being able to find its products and check out, while Amazon would rather the shopper used Amazon's agent in the first place.

The sessions have been more useful than the booths. More presenters are talking about the downsides of AI alongside the upside and saying where it fits and where it doesn't. Startup alley has been the best part of the show. The smaller companies there have to be specific about what they sell, and most of them are.

Some exhibitors are still putting the word agentic on whatever they sold last year, and retailers spend the day walking between those booths and the sessions. Meta has refused so far to take Amazon out of Muse. I'd like to know how long that lasts, and whether Amazon goes the Perplexity route again.

Costco finished fiscal 2026 with $297.2B in net sales, up 10.1% from last year. The fourth quarter looks better on the surface than it does once you read the adjusted numbers in the release.

Membership fees came to $5.9B for the year, up 11%. Operating income was $11.7B, so fees account for about half of it.

Costco also ended the year with $20.2B in cash, up from $14.2B, while spending $848M on buybacks over the same period. The share count is almost exactly where it was a year ago. I'd like to know what Costco plans to do with that money.