By Dominick Miserandino, CEO, RTM Nexus
I get asked all the time what independent retailers should be doing right now to compete with the big optimized players. I was talking through this recently with Kathy Donovan Wagner on The Richard Retailer, and my honest answer is: I don’t think anyone fully knows what the next six months look like. But I do have a strong guess about where the opportunity sits, and it’s not in the technology arms race. It’s in two things that sound almost old-fashioned: making the store an experience worth showing up for, and actually talking to your customers.
You can’t out-optimize Amazon, so don’t try
Walmart, Amazon, and the big boxes are only going to get more optimized. That race has been running since the dawn of retail, Sears Roebuck was mailing houses to the Midwest in the 1940s, and independents never won it by being cheaper or more convenient. They won by being the store where the owner knew your name. That’s still true, it’s just that social media has made it possible to do it at a scale that used to require decades of foot traffic.
I saw a restaurant near me run a weekly theme night, a Taylor Swift night with friendship-bracelet making, tied straight to what was trending that week. When Sly Stone passed away, another restaurant did a memorial dinner built around his music. Neither of those took a big budget. They took someone paying attention to what their community actually cared about and building a reason to show up that Amazon simply cannot replicate. A friend of mine who runs a local site in Quebec City put it simply: let’s just tell people to come down and go for a walk. That’s the whole idea. It doesn’t need to be complicated to work.
The 13% you’re leaving on the table
Here’s a less glamorous but more reliable lever: inventory on your best sellers. If you sell 25 units of your top item a month, and you’re not consistently carrying 25 in stock, you’re losing roughly 13% in sales you’d otherwise get, guaranteed. We track this across clients and it holds up every time. People resist it because reordering what already works isn’t exciting compared to bringing in something new. But the data is unambiguous: stock what’s already proven before you chase what’s untested.
Call your own customers
The single highest-leverage, lowest-tech thing I’ve seen an independent retailer do is simply call their customers. Years ago I advised a shop owner with about 50 customers to call every one of them from the night before and ask what they thought, what they needed, what went wrong. She built a running spreadsheet of every answer. When I ran AdoramaPix, I did the same thing at scale: pulled the top 200 customers who hadn’t ordered in six months and called them directly. One wanted a 17% coupon. Fine, done. Another wanted a factory tour. Also fine, come by, we’ll grab pizza after.
None of that required a new platform or a dashboard. It required someone picking up the phone and asking why not, instead of guessing. Retail Mavens talks about the same math a different way: out of ten customers who walk through your door or your site, two of them are your real business, the ones driving the bulk of your revenue. Once you know who those two are, the job gets much simpler: focus your energy on genuinely knowing them, not on chasing the other eight.
Personalization that actually feels personal
Every retailer sends a birthday email now, which means the birthday email means almost nothing anymore. What still lands is the version that feels genuinely personal: calling a longtime customer the day before their birthday, not to sell anything, just to say thank you for the five purchases this year. That takes a minute and a real relationship. It reads completely differently from an automated template, because it is completely different.
Where to actually spend your energy
If you’re an independent retailer trying to figure out where to focus with limited time and a small team, here’s the honest answer: less time on the newest tool, more time on experiential moments tied to what your community already cares about, and more time on the phone with your actual customers. The tech will keep evolving and you should use it, but it’s not the differentiator. Connection is. It always has been, since long before there was a Google to bid on or an algorithm to chase, and it’s the one advantage the big boxes structurally cannot buy.
This piece grew out of a conversation on The Richard Retailer with Kathy Donovan Wagner, available here.