[Music] [Music] ladies and gentlemen welcome to digital grocer mercatus's very own podcast season 4 episode 3 i'm really excited and joining me as always is my faithful faithful co-host mark fairhurst our vp of marketing mark welcome to the show it's great to be here you know it's it's kind of an interesting show because it's our first time in a long time where we're actually doing a show without a guest without a guest um and and this is basically you and me unfiltered was it ever filtered befo
re well i think we always had a structure yeah yeah we have some ideas about what we want to talk about but this this is this is us ripping it yeah it's it's kind of like one of those things where the industry is just changing by leaps and bounds on it on i i used to say quarterly basis it used to be years ago to be on an annual basis somebody would come out with something innovative and then you'd go to a trade show you'd see it and then miraculously would die on the vine for some reason and no
w it's like there are innovations happening in this space that are being kind of spurred by the pandemic so we're seeing it now occur on a daily basis there's a tremendous amount of news that's kind of filtering down to us through the trades uh and through um yeah the tech space quite frankly yeah it's coming fast and furious i mean it's it used to be that we had a planned program for these shows but now it's the new as you said the news is happening so fast it's pushing us to uh to expound on t
hese these or at least comment on what's happening very very a lot faster than we anticipated yeah it's kind of interesting mark you and i were talking about this last week in one of our you know late evening telephone calls and you know i made the kind of much much to your wife and my wife yeah my wife says you know you should work fairs more than you see me one before the pandemic folks right and it's kind of odd you know i said to mark i said i have this interesting feeling and i don't think
this is wrong or or or right i mean i mean i think it's i think it quite frankly may be a good thing uh in some cases it's like the dominant tech players in the space are kind of coming in i want i don't want to say taking over grocery but i think they're coming in to rescue grocery services that's that's an interesting perspective it's it's um they're certainly bringing a different dynamic dynamism to the to the industry yeah well we were on that that you know the whole um webinar yesterday wit
h the folks from incisive and media and that you know there was my uh myself jack record over from shopper kit and jeff baskin over from flyby and you know one of the questions that kind of came out is and it came from an audience member is is delivery ever going to be ever going to be profitable and then there was the whole question about labor management and that jack did a really great job in tackling and kind of jeff jumped in on you know how do you make sure that you're that last moment of
that interaction with the consumer where you're giving them the stuff that they're coming to get in on a curbside pickup scenario is really you know seamless and smooth they had great arguments then you know the question that came to me was well what about service fees and you know i i answered i answered the question in a way that was like i think retailers in this day and age today are caught where they were 20 years ago and mark you may have lived through this but i remember 20 years ago when
i worked for a research company a lot of retailers were struggling how to compete against walmart and they were trying to compete against walmart on price which which is basically nuts it's not and you just it's it's you just can't do it it makes absolutely no sense to do something like that you just don't have the buying power and you can't you can't spread it across the the store footprint that walmart can well absolutely and you're right because if you're a grocery retailer and you're not de
aling with general merchandise so you don't have that bump up in margin to be able to do that so you're dealing in the world of one to three percent you know if you're a whole foods maybe six percent yeah you know it used to be six percent not sure what it is today but the reality is is that when you think of service fees and you know retailers are asking us today clients and non-clients saying you know i don't want to charge service fees to my customers because walmart down the street is you kn
ow not charging any but hey whoa hold on here like you know they can make that up in their in their margin you can't right so you're going to be strategic in thinking well hey if my average basket is 84. is that a profitable basket as it is today chances are it may not be do i just set a threshold hey if you buy a hundred dollars you or you buy 95 then maybe i won't charge you a service fee yeah i know and i think you know the the proliferation of last mile uh delivery providers i mean definitel
y in the last three or four years consumers will pay for convenience not every consumer will right but but a segment of your shopper base will sure sure edit listen i pay i do pay so be 7.99 for every delivery that comes in and uh i you know and i'm not just saying this because i can afford it i'd pay 10.99 because the service is that good and the web experience is is really that good yeah and i think sobeys has done a really good job and again this goes back to our thesis i think big tech is co
ming into rescue grocery to certain extent soviets is leaning heavily on ocado 100 to support them and in canada you know our choices our choices here are fairly limited you know you have instacart we definitely have corner shop with uber right right so they've cut deals with um longo's i believe they've cut a deal with metro as well as some of the local pharmacies yep and some of the big brands as well so they're they're kind of doing that and then you have um voila by soyuz and then you you ha
ve some choice with depending on where you live with uh president's choice or loblaw right that's about it it's not like where if you were in in the u.s right now where you would have a ton more of options in terms of how you want your food delivered and i think correct me if i'm wrong i think retailers are now kind of looking to silicon valley and saying how do we get better at this can you help us can you partner with us i think yeah and and i definitely think that bringing in the uh the techn
ology companies is raising the game for some retailers other retailers are just in a quandary as to what what they should be doing and who should they be partnering with we're so you know we're this is a crazy question we read about this we don't talk about it we don't talk about it on our show yeah were retailers dismissive that this day would come no that that's a great question um actually i was just having a conversation with someone earlier uh today you know it's i think as a species we bec
ome tunnel vision right we just get used to doing the same thing over and over again and it takes a an external shock something to really jolt us out of our way of doing things like like the pandemic right um to get those lateral thinkers to actually grasp on onto new modes and ways of thinking and operating and i think this you know if you look at the grocery industry this definitely is that catalyst but i also think there's there will be a group of retailers who just can't make that leap yeah
and what i get concerned about is if if you think back to the financial crisis of the way and this is this is we've talked about this yeah and this is entirely different yeah we talked about this late at night yeah um you know in oh wait what we saw is is a trade down effect and a trade out effect right so if you were shopping at dinan de luca and you you lived in south park charlotte north carolina which is an affluent area in that gated community by this really nice dean of deluca and you lost
your job at wells fargo or bank of america which we knew dna had a tremendous amount of layoffs in charlotte north carolina i mean i was at ground zero that the day it happened was just brutal i was staying at the omni downtown i was working for uh food line in salisbury and suddenly you can't go to dean angelica okay so your your next bet is you're going to a local harris teeter you're going to a food lion it's okay so if you can ex afford those you're trading down into a bottom dollar foods m
aybe a walmart and guess what if you can't afford those two at that point you know maybe you're going to a dollar store for canned food maybe you're supplementing with you know with government subsidies or you're going over to a food bank and that gets really scary now the the challenges that we see is you know when the economy rebounded people went back into their regular habits right you know for the for the most part but the reality is now is you have two effects you have people yes that they
've lost their job and they and we know that the snappy bt program uh subscription rates are through the roof in the united states right right and so at that point you have people that are probably trading down and trading out but you have people now for safety reasons this is the kicker here laterally shifting yeah right and this and our research the the report that we recently published shows this online loyalty right is a fraction of what it is for brick and mortar right so there's so there's
a third element here and this was a this was an amazing um i don't want to call it a debate it was a conversation that you and i had with the analyst team over at goldman's on on friday out of new york i think we had some i know we had someone from new york dialing in london as well in london england is we're getting a lot of reports from retailers that trade dollars have dried up or are non-existent to a certain extent and what i mean like trading co-op dollars dollars that are given by the me
rchant or the cpg over to the merchant they're negotiating with okay the dirty word slotting fees placement in the flyer the coupon the floor graphic the discounts the whatever the trading co-op dollars are imagined and we know we know this for a fact there are a lot of retailers out there that they those dollars are very important they're important to the category manager because they may be tied to their compensation their bonus plan to demonstrate profitability of their category and to a reta
iler quite frankly simply for survivability well yeah and you've said to me in the past i mean this is the difference between a retailer being profitable yes with a one or two percent margin absolutely and that and and then uh actually being in the negative for an annual um for a year or more yeah and you know we've waited call it 14 15 years to do it to do uh to bolt in an ad network into our solution until we knew that hey we weren't going to go affect the trading co-op budgets and that we wer
e simply going to go up to towards maybe the above-the-line media dollars that have been shifting to digital and that's why we waited so long because we didn't want to be part of a group that was going to cannibalize that so now you have this pandemic effect where people are trading down trading out and then laterally shifting into e-commerce and quite frankly not remaining necessarily loyal to their key retailer because they're looking for a retailer that has availability of stock availability
of time slots for either pickup or delivery yeah now you combine this third variable which is the reality of trading co-op dollars that are drying up and you know the the talk on the street from a lot of cpgs is hey listen you know we're we're experiencing woes on our side on the main on in manufacturing we need those extra dollars to cover that um there is a shortage of certain raw materials quite frankly now we're hearing shortage of aluminum because there was a spike on on pedal bikes and so
now there's not a lot of aluminum for you bought one i know you did i did and you have you know there's a lock now leaving them for cans and uh the trade tariffs anyways it kind of gets complicated even though even appliances refrigerant absolutely so dishwasher yeah you're on waiting lists so you're on waiting lists so so now you have this lack of availability of these trade dollars and you know yesterday progressive grocer did it um a great reporting on how retailers like walmart and and amazo
n and many others are building out their digital practices their digital ad networks yeah much like what we did and we're supporting at least three of our retailers and doing this yeah and my fear is you're going to see an increase in bankruptcy in grocery retail in the smaller tiers where they weren't ready for e-commerce they may have lost so you know they succumbed to the three variables number one is they've lost consumers that are trading out number two they've lost uh lost consumers i shou
ld say not retailers they've lost consumers that are trading laterally shifting to their competitor because they do e-commerce much better or they just do it yeah and then suddenly you don't have access to the trade funds anymore and because the traditional spend has now gone digital yeah it absolutely has well it's it's gone digital i think it's gone the dollars are being spent in home and digital yeah right so what i mean in home i'm talking about tv right so tv spends and digital spends and a
nd cpgs i've always said and you know mark you went to i can't remember the firm that we used to work with but we used to be able to go attend these great events on a monthly basis yeah it'll come back to me anyways um and then we had chats with the folks the senior team over at heinz and you've chatted with the folks over at nestle and so on and cpts have always said hey we can get distribution distribution is not difficult for us you know we can we can buy a run of facebook a run of you know k
eywords or you know an instagram whatever it's it's conversion that they want the ability to influence you at the moment of your about to click on something and quite frankly as human beings we are you know in the 70s we used to be bombarded on average 400 to 700 times a day with advertisement in this day and age it's north of 10 000 a day so if you're a cpg and you want to make that span go go spend it on on a platform where people are buying yeah otherwise you're going to be immersed in a lot
of noise it's where to your point the conversion uh the ability to influence the shopper at the moment they're purchasing is is going to happen yeah absolutely so i think this is just going to be the norm um quite frankly moving forward and i i dread what's going to happen with the industry well and you know that gets to a something we may want to talk about it's once the once the artificial inflation of top line sales for grocers dissipates or goes away after the pandemic you know what happens
to these retailers when they don't have that extra revenue to rely on our thesis is that the wave of bankruptcies um will be much bigger than what we're anticipating or anybody would be anticipating so that leaves what that leaves you with the large national tier one retailers those tier 2 retailers that were strategic in their thinking and being able to stand up and experience that is differentiated at the same time as you have these new technology players coming into the space right you mentio
ned the ocados of the world yeah yeah and that's this is where the team at ocado didn't agree um you know they had so the team at goldman had this thesis which was can retailers leverage i look up here because i'm just thinking um can retailers leverage media dollars digital media dollars to offset costs and and so on and my argument to them potentially because you you have to be mindful of your you know your labor costs your picking packing and your so on and this just there's so many factors a
nd my answer to them was not every retailer will be able to pull this off right right that's number one number two is i wanted to encourage them to think about this third variable that we just mentioned which is hey if those in-store trade dollars are eroding and no longer going this becomes an issue and this has been the and you know the dirty secret of the industry has always been that fifty percent of any given marketing budget is spent on the print flyer and and i will hear the arguments day
in and day out that it is the best customer acquisition tool that retailers have i don't agree with that the reason i don't agree with that like layla casha the cmo at grocery outlet she's a beacon she doesn't do flyers yeah and this is she's a seasoned executive i met her when she was originally at sprouts farmers markets and then she went up she went over to the safe mark company in modesto and now she knows she's worked her way up the corporate ladder to become an extremely powerful cmo and
grocery outlet has a unique business model in any case but you know she's taking her flyer dollars and she's put them into digital yeah yeah harris teeter i think their flyer is like one page and so now you have i i feel bad for the printing company it's going to lose a bunch of revenue but you know that 50 is not just printing costs it's the people that you need to build out those flyers and they are complicated they're not easy um and surprisingly enough i haven't looked at flip and see how th
ey're doing as a business because of that but anyways maybe if i have a few minutes i'll do that yeah yeah so it's all interesting stuff so goldman is i know that they were having the london team was having conversations with tesco uh and uh ocado to kind of get their thoughts on this we know that ocado you know has stopped reporting the amount of money that they take in from digital ad revenue and i think the team at goldman really wanted to find out is it a case that you're just not reporting
it anymore or is it just because you know you've lost those dollars so they're supposed to be coming out with a positioning uh that's sure you mean the team at tesco at tesco sorry yeah yeah and broker has done the same kroger has done the same that's true yeah so i'm interesting to see what the team that goldman's going to come out with as a positioning paper which i believe will be available sometime in november and hopefully we'll have access to it to be able to share it out to the group now
speaking of avocado i was just i was just going to go here yeah yes the perfect segue there you go so i'm going to let you spill the beans well it came out about a week ago that um auto store which is the norwegian based uh robotics company that we know pretty well and we've had andrew benzinger on our show we've talked a few times about it auto store is uh is suing uh ocado for patent infringement right right it's interesting because if you've ever been involved in any form of litigation and yo
u know i've i've been through my fair share of litigation and uh going after people that are infringing on on my intellectual property and my company's intellectual property um as well as defending you know right the first incarnation of mercatus was springboard retail networks where we designed a computer that goes on a shopping cart which you know we own a tremendous amount of ip not just design but also methodology patents and software patents and you know now we know that amazon's got a cart
that's out there and there's casper who has this other type of flare flavor of a cart and you know we're not patent trolls and there's a way and there's a process to be able to kind of follow if you're you want to go down the road of protecting your ip what i find interesting in this case here between auto store and okado is the reality is in north america right now ocado has two exclusive relationships the first one in canada with soviets which kind of bars them from doing business with any ot
her retailer in canada okay let's be honest here in canada the only other suitor that would make sense would be potentially walmart canada which i doubt that would occur yeah and we know that walmart in the us at least is working with alert innovations which is which is an auto store type provider right and then you have uh in the united states broker so what we don't know yet out of this case will this put a kibosh on soviets in canada rolling out its its second um cfc in montreal and will it p
revent kroger from doing the same so we don't know if there's been you know with this lawsuit a cease and desist in terms of rolling out any technology i think the reality hasn't been privy to a lot of litigation and sat in on some of these matters some of my own some of some with others it is always in the best interest of the of the plaintiff to allow the defendant to continue generating revenue with the view that hey if your dean is infringing then i have a right to that revenue right that's
the first the first thing yep i don't know so what do you think auto stores end game is here it's tough to say because you know on one side you know kado has put himself to get into the north american market has gone ahead and signed an exclusive arrangement right with two of the largest players and that chances are it's not a lifetime exclusivity it may be a timed exclusivity right so giving them the opportunity to prove out their technology work out the kicks in the north american market and t
hen hopefully use that as a kind of a a beacon to be able to get more clients right but at the same time if it drums up enough interest in in mfc technology or cfc technology this is a great opportunity for the companies like auto store to be able to to to jump into the market and and to go ahead and take all the other retailers that you know ocado won't be able to work with you know you can think of i don't know publix and the list goes on i mean i don't know who they're working with but yeah i
mean we know that auto store has an agreement with heb i don't think it's uh rolled out yet but i think that was recently announced but you're right i mean there is there is that tier of retailers that they could use as part of their um addressable market yeah this is tough to say but if in one previous experience that i have had where we were approached by a um us-based holding company basically represented by a law firm i won't call them i won't necessarily call them a patent troll but they t
hey came aggressively after us under the under the guys that we were potentially infringing on some of their technology uh which we ended up subsequently kind of settling with them and licensing a bunch of things yeah but in the conversations with them what became apparent is the family that owned the portfolio really wanted out of managing the portfolio and they were really they were actually they offered for us they wanted to know if we would buy the portfolio interesting and buy everything ou
t and so when you become a patent troll just or everyone's never done this let me just give you uh a uh sylvan is 101 [Laughter] trolling we have we have the episode title now yeah we do patent trolling 101 with with the folks over at mercatus most popular show ever must be up probably it'll surpass britain lad show that's right so the um what you do let's assume let's assume you have a portfolio more than just one pad like one one's never enough what you normally do is there's a series of of te
chnology slash law firms that are very much specialized in this and what you do is you you bring to them your portfolio and what they will do is they will assess the uh potential of infringement that's out there so um there was a couple of companies in ottawa that were very very very skilled in the design of memory technology and they amassed a massive portfolio and they eventually stopped making memory technology and became quote-unquote their own troll and it's not not a nice word but basicall
y maybe they're defending their rights so what you do is once they're done the assessment if they think there's value in this they will set up a limited liability company you transfer your intellectual property into the hands of that limited liability company is co-owned by the owners of the ip and as well as the firm representing and any money that they get out from going after getting licensing fees and so on is used to pay down first and foremost the legal costs and then post that whatever's
left is split depending on the arrangement you have if this is not necessarily a 50 50 split it can be you know 80 20. it doesn't really matter but that's typically how it works now what they don't tell you and this is the assessment you have to make as a quote unquote someone who wants to defend their own intellectual property is you have to be very much prepared to have your name sullied and what that means is you know if i look at you know the 35 plus patents that i'm on my name's on it and i
'm not dead i'm very much alive you know i woke up this morning i'm like oh i have a pulse so that's really what what sticks with people you know and that's that's the reputation loss of becoming becoming a patent troll but i mean it's i mean first of all i appreciate the education um secondly i'm glad you pronounced ottawa not the way tucker curls how does he pronounce it he doesn't it's auto or some some bizarre pronunciation uh but but thirdly you know that begs the question yeah and this goe
s back to you know what is auto store because you got to think of auto stores going after ocado the biggest fish they've got fabric you know they've got takeoff technologies they've got alert innovations everyone playing in the same space that they could they could go after alternatively you know this for ocado i think the simplest thing would be just to buy auto store it could be they may could very very well be the case it's an odd way of doing it yeah let me let me see you then let me ask you
to buy me but like yeah i i've i've seen those things materialize in in the past right if you can't you can't join them try to beat them some way to to market and i just i find it odd because um i try to dig up the uh the initial filings of the case and i don't want to pay two thousand dollars to our legal counsel to kind of dig it up for me so i can read it but listen i think this this will this will all get settled this will not because here here's what's going to happen so immediately okado'
s legal counsel in the uk in the uk has very strong ip process it would be immediately digging up first and foremost so when you go and patent you you go through the patent feasibility process and a very strong the lawyer and ip council will have dug up for you what potentially you may be infringing on to give the inventor the opportunity to circumvent and if they felt that there's a risk of infringement but there really isn't the law firm would have issued letters of opinion of non-infringement
so those were likely if those exist those are being shared if they don't exist then the biggest thing that okada is going to have to do to put auto store on their back heels is go and submit um an ip review process to determine uh to to invalidate the ip right and that just i mean if your auto store i'll tell you if that occurs when we live through it in canada with research in motion watch out watch out because their cost is significant and if you're not closing deals you're not making sales a
nd here's what i would hate i would i would caution when these things go this way you have to have deep pockets and no grocery retailer wants to get in bed with a vendor i think anyways that is going through this i've seen it i've seen it so many times happen and i just hope i i hope and i pray that this will be resolved for those two companies i know i respect both of them and i think britain lad is their chief marketing officer over at at auger store now out of store yeah yeah wonderful gentle
man he's a smart guy um you know but i get it like they're defending their rights and that's okay too right yeah yeah it it is becoming increasingly complicated as the technology companies move more into to grocery speaking of which yeah amazon oh my god i've never seen it on oh my god ghwd yes yes it is um what was the news there well so it's the fact that they bought a percentage of uh spartan ash stock and it was disclosed i mean i wasn't aware i think i don't know if the industry was aware t
hat the national inside the distribution side of spartan ash was supplying you know amazon i think since 26 2015 2016. yeah and they bought us something i think 14 i believe yeah i think you round it round it up it's like 15. but it's over for spartan it's a it's a significant investment it is much much higher than your typical um supplier and vendor or or customer relationship in the grocery space to secure a line of uh a product of supply yeah so that's that's why i think eyebrows are being ra
ised they yeah they are like surprisingly enough like you know we don't we don't get to go to trade shows and hear the rumor mail anymore so you know how what's the reaction amongst amongst the folks i think that i think the reality is you know amazon has always been a company that's not afraid to pay to learn and and then to eventually eventually buy something so you know i remember many years ago being in the southwest walking to a grocery store with a fellow client at the time and i was surpr
ised i mean there was tons of amazon people running around and kind of made the comment and they said oh this is wow you're working with amazon it's fairly risky because you know they have the culture that they will will learn and test and try things and then eventually make it their own are you aren't you worried no we think it's a great partnership we're not having to use our labor and and so on okay that's that's great well you know lo and behold they turn around they buy whole foods i'm not
suggesting that's going to happen in the case of spark nash i think what amazon in my estimation is you know if they really want to scale quickly in the world of grocery buying or building stores is the least of their problems it's it's that's the easy part you know and i know that the retailers are listening sly you've never built a store you don't know what it's like yeah no i've never built the store but been in this space for almost 22 years and i've talked to many of grocers that have share
d their woes and the construction experts and so on the reality is is amazon's distribution network as amazing as it is as fast as it's going you know we know that they're building their second largest distribution center in canada on the outskirts of ottawa thank you chuckler carlson and they're going to be building another one here north of toronto yeah um hog hog sound as most people may not know um it's not the same in those distribution centers i can't see how do you do half general merchan
dise and then half frozen and and the logistics of carrying that stuff i think you just go out and you just get someone to do it to let you scale fast and then you come back you figure it out and you partner more or you build your own it's it's the same it's the same example we you know made new um that you just gave is they're learning the the fresh and uh frozen and private to be honest private label uh business in in grocery from a distributor like spartan ash right right well you know we i d
on't know who makes whole foods private label it might be damon worldwide over in connecticut super company i mean those guys are embedded with a lot of the retailers i mean kirk the kirkland brand for the most part i think is damon you know quite frankly i think here's what i want to tell our listeners don't be dismissive of amazon this isn't this isn't an experiment for them this is the reality there you know i we've said this on countless shows we've said this and we have rewritten about this
countless blog posts articles yep yep you know household penetration rate for groceries 98 the baskets are larger now for the most part share of wallet is being concentrated with a few retailers because of the pandemic and amazon if they can tap into that household penetration rate to feed into everything else that they do on the media side on the whatever side this is going to benefit them absolutely and absolutely if you thought it was an experiment before they bought whole foods the purchase
of a whole foods should have taught you if they if you thought they weren't going to open their own stores the store in woodland hills california should teach you what they can do and and i think like when i when we when we decided the title for this show to a certain extent there's a lot of great silicon valley companies that are coming to the rescue of retailers to support them with true partnership and so on but there are those like an amazon that's just going to come to the table to crush a
nd to dominate and you know i don't think you know i'm not sure how amazon could they survive the trade down and trade out i think a hundred percent because they have other assets that can fund their grocery business to nauseam yeah i mean they they'll deny it to the cows come home that they leverage other revenue streams from other lines of business but in the reality is they do i mean i think the report that just came out of congress on the big tech players um definitely on as far as amazon is
concerned seed as a as a unfair advantage um yeah retail so i watched that the whole the whole proceedings and you know i think tim cook got off slight oh light like i'm sure if he would have been there live they would have hugged them you know it's apple who doesn't like apple but i felt you know they you have politicians that are not business and technology experts asking questions that are likely not even prepared by them and not giving the opportunity for the person they're asking the quest
ion to to to to give a valid answer i don't think jeff bezos gets out of bed in the morning and says i want to screw everyone in retail i don't think that's the case i think it's the reality is um we capitalism is a great system but we have a tendency when it gets too good for some to want to punish it yeah and i don't agree i don't i i subscribe to the idea of free markets and i can debate about this until till the cows come home till till jeff bezos buys those cows right and and we don't let t
hese he needs the milk needs well he's going to but he's going because he's got to sell cheap he's got all those stores he's going to sell cheaper bananas than trader joe's which was like everyone was just shocked like who would sell bananas cheaper than trader joe's like come on it's the free market this is the way this these things are supposed to work and i know we tend to want to punish these people for kind of taking these bold moves and so on now um there's also this notion of social respo
nsibility which i'm i'm i'm kind of both sides of the coin you know when you get really good how much do you kick it back to society and i think we see that in certain forms i get more concerned not so much of what these companies are going to do but what are what is grocery retail and and retail in general going to do to innovate and i know that's very difficult when your margins are three percent your error uh your margin of error is very very slim and anything you do may be scrutinized like c
razy or even more concern is the social responsibility facebook has in its dominant voice and controlling a platform that what is it how many users now three billion maybe yeah at least at least that could that that fundamentally concerns me how it can be used to have to plan it just just to fundamentally shift the thinking of people that that starts to concern me right yeah um yeah i mean there's so there's like crazy things happening in in in the world and guess what this is it's not going to
get any better no no listen i i know this you know we got one other topic we wanted to go yes which is um you know our friends at instacart announced uh another round of money being raised yeah i think their valuation now is over 17 billion u.s 17 billion yeah so it's impressive well impressive growth right i think it's they went from a previous valuation of 13 i would say 13.6 13.8.8 up to um 17 which i think is is fundamentally tied to the to the growth that anyone that's in e-commerce is seei
ng today which i think is great listen i get excited when any tech company is doing well is raising capital and is fundamentally trying to just kind of kind of change um they recently had an article on them and progressive grosser uh with their president and they they it's funny because they see their their business model as being kind of four facets four sides so you have the consumer the retailer the cpg and then the personal shopper i cannot imagine the challenges of kind of creating that equ
ation that balances out all those four four sides to it so be interesting to kind of see what happens in their continued partnership with grocery retail and we're not you know i'm not hearing a lot about shipped in the market no the marketing has kind of quieted down i think the other the news really is about uber you've seen the ubereats commercials on tv yes we do know that instacart was able to get uh uber to basically correct their ways as far as corner shop was concerned yeah and that's you
know i hate to say this we we live this at mercatus yeah we're we're constantly blocking people from scraping data trying to anyways uh and when i say data it's like product images you know and just trying to stop those people from from doing those things and it's not easy i mean i'm one i remember at one point um these the servers were coming from microsoft azure so guess what we did we fundamentally blocked anything coming from microsoft it is it is because at the end of the day it's theft i
mean sure i mean the product image data you know we we don't produce all of it and we subscribe to data providers in order to like we license that data for the benefit of our retailers i understand that instacart um also took some proprietary imaging which has which has a cost to it you know it's it's it's not a good business practice yeah this is and this goes back to like the whole conversation on ip right fundamentally any individual in business has a right to protect your intellectual proper
ty so like why wouldn't you so i'm excited to see what's going to happen in grocery um leading up to thanksgiving it's going to be a interesting fall it's going to be i gotta think mark it's this should be like a big big you know bonus thanksgiving for a lot of retailers people not going out to restaurants yeah kind of staying local staying with their families i got to assume it's going to be good yeah i mean we just had the canadian thanksgiving i i don't know what the numbers were in terms of
grocery retail i guess those will come out in a few weeks but you're right i do get a sense a lot of people were staying at home and and spending it with a very close family unit yeah and i'm assuming is the same thing is going to happen in the us yeah i was actually told that uh canadian turkey sales were down really yeah yeah i don't know if that's that's uh true but i overheard it from one canadian grocery retail executives interest first year that turkey sales are down i guess um fewer peopl
e got gathering and having smaller uh smaller dinners yeah or if any well we ended up buying you know pre-sliced pre-cut turkey at a at a place for for two people yeah right yeah all right so mark how do people get to like this show they can hit the subscribe button they can hit the like button on digitalgrocer.com that would be the easiest way follow our youtube channel follow us on social media all right and they can always reach you at uh savann.perrier mercatus.com and me at mark.fairhurst.m
ercatus.com absolutely ladies and gentlemen it's been a pleasure having you on this uh just marking my show i guess you could call it that and then we went well normally it's 30 minutes we went wow wow we went for 47. an hour yeah that's awesome that's great folks thank you very much talk to you soon peace
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