HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS HIS LATEST INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN

 

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Walmart and McDonald’s Reveal the Real Risk of Letting an Agent Shop for You

Can a consumer’s AI agent navigate powerful price-setting agents on the other side of transactions?

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Oct 6, 2026

As we enter the Agentic age, each and every day some tech vendor, social media site, or software provider is offering us free, simple and painless tools that will allow us to have more and more of our boring, repetitive and largely mindless day-to-day tasks and activities handled for us, without taking up more than a few minutes of our precious time.

Whether it’s Muse from Meta, dots from OpenAI or Instinct AI from some 23-year-old guy that no one’s ever heard of (with billions in funding), the onslaught of AI-infused assistants, agents and enablers has begun in earnest and shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. I’m not in a position to offer any specific advice at this point or pick a favorite, because no one really knows what’s behind these officious and aggressive little operatives—or what exactly they’re doing with whatever data and other personal information you’re encouraged to turn over to them.

The sizeable lists of uses, consents and authorizations that you’re asked to agree to in order to get these things rolling is unclear, way too broad, and a little frightening, because very few of us even understand what we’d be signing up for. The terms and conditions are just as dense and unintelligible. But if you’re game to experiment, I would caution you not to turn more than one of these irritating, invasive and omnipresent creatures loose on your life unless you are a glutton for punishment and have nothing else to do with your time beyond constantly responding to inquiries, requests, updates, suggestions and demands from your new “time-saving” assistant.

This whole “trust me” approach sounds like a slippery slope and a strategy that ultimately depends on our own laziness, where we get battered down by the incessant flow of requests for permission and consents and we just bag it and say “do your best” or something equally perilous. Remember that improved speed, access, and convenience were the bad trades we made long ago in exchange for our privacy. This new wave of inquisitive helpers sounds even worse to me.

Letting an agent do your shopping for you is a whole new can of worms and reminds me of Jeff Bezos’s observation that consumers don’t want to negotiate the price of things every time they shop. The unstated predicate for that comment is that you’re supposed to trust Jeff’s algorithms to get you the best prices. But what if the prices are moving targets and, worse yet, are based upon some composite persona that various vendors have developed to describe you, your purchasing behaviors and your purchase history. How is your agent supposed to deal with powerful price-setting agents on the other side of transactions? Who’s going to decide who got the best deal?

All of which brings me to the latest face-off between Walmart and McDonald’s in regard to their respective real-time pricing strategies. Walmart takes the high road and says that the price for the product is the price and it’s the same price for all customers. McDonald’s is using AI to recommend personalized menu prices which I would call predatory since—by their own admission—these prices are based on transaction data and local willingness to pay. Let me know when you find those folks who are happily willing to pay more for the same product, because I have plenty of other things I’d love to sell to them.

And, just to add to the mess, you need to understand that non-human actors are already responsible for roughly 55 percent of all global web traffic. We’re talking about scripted agents, automated bots, machine-driven commercial transactions, and, of course, AI agents. Humans are already in the minority on the web and now we’re being invited to take another step back and let our helpers do the job for us. If you think that these tasks are getting easier or clearer, you haven’t been to the airport lately.

While gas prices may seem high, try paying $11 for a single copy of any of the glossy weekly magazines at the newsstand. Just to be clear, it’s not like any prices are immutable and fixed objects these days. Amazon’s systems change the prices of millions of items virtually minute-by-minute to react to competitors pricing changes. Even the publishers themselves don’t know what’s happening with their own pricing. Subscribing for a year to The New Yorker at a discount online site will allegedly save you $253 compared to what they say is an aggregate newsstand price of $422 (or $9 an issue), even when the cover of the magazine itself says $10.99. The actual subscription price you’ll be paying per issue for your 47 issues a year is $3.60.

I’ll leave it up to you to determine how your shopping agent is going to make sense of pricing schemes like these, in-store couponing and daily discounting, membership price cuts, and a host of other promotional offerings in every store and even more aggressively online.

The bottom line for the moment is probably a word or two of caution before you turn over the purse strings to any of your accounts. Saving time may generally be more valuable than saving a few bucks, but not if you have only the vaguest idea of how intelligently your cash is being spent.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Three New Rules to Create Customer Loyalty

Hanging on to consumers and clients has never been more difficult. Make sure you know what you're up against. 

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

MAY 21, 2024

 

It's becoming increasingly obvious that Amazon is still the leader of the online retail pack even as a number of other major players like Target and Walmart successfully grow their own online presences. To date, the relative growth of the other big players doesn't appear to be coming out of Amazon's share of the pie which is still increasing.

Instead, the online pie itself continues to expand and, to the extent that there's ongoing cannibalization, it's mainly at the expense of traditional retail operators. There has already been a wave of store closure announcements from the likes of Family Dollar, Rue 21, CVS Health, Rite Aid, Express, The Body Shop and Macy's, to name a few.

Today, if you're not building a competitive and protected position on one of the major provider platforms, you're absolutely nowhere and just waiting for the ax to fall. The big platforms are the only place left for the smaller merchants to be.

And, if you're a large traditional retail player, (unlike Amazon which fairly quickly abandoned its own attempts to create a retail bookstore business), you have to keep one eye on the problem of how the expanding web activity is going to adversely impact your physical stores. This is the nightmare scenario that we're increasingly seeing in terms of legalized online casino gaming. There are  currently seven states that allow betting by phone on these kinds of games - whereas almost 40 states have legalized mobile sports betting, which has exploded. The casino owners are already starting to complain about decreases in physical traffic at their venues.

Suffice it to say, all of these issues are only going to get worse as the next generation picks up the play.  You can bet (no pun intended) that the biggest traditional retailers are watching this gambling action quite carefully. Not only isn't this an issue for Amazon, but I'd also guess (to add some additional insult to their injuries) that some of the backend computing resources for these new online casino games are being supplied by Amazon Web Services (AWS) itself. Plenty of oars in the Amazon boat.

Amazon's own results and growth are being accelerated by the power of its other platforms - advertising, fulfillment, video and AWS for starters - the stickiness and expansion of the Prime bundles, and its aggressive race to continue to be the best and fastest player in the delivery game. Speed, ease of access, and convenience are still the dominant differentiators, but there are a number of new drivers for success in online retail, which will increasingly separate the winners from the also-rans who don't pick up on the new rules. Amazon is already on top of all of them and the rest of the world is playing catch-up.

There are three main areas of concern:

First, too many choices often result in no decision. The more options people have, the less likely they are to choose anything. The clearer the offer, the fewer the choices, the quicker the buyer decides. The trick is to remove as much thought and evaluation as possible from the purchase process and continually shorten the window between consideration and consumption.  Amazon's Overall Picks and Best Seller labels help simplify the selection process. Limited time discount offers also accelerate the speed of the transactions.

Second, brand loyalty is the best tool for overcoming decision confusion, reluctance, and fatigue. Consumers want fewer choices and total confidence in them, and this is exactly the promise that strong brand identities offer. Life is increasingly complicated and buyers are most comfortable returning to familiar products and services rather than making new and risky selections. Amazon's Subscribe and Save programs for recurring regular purchases, especially on replenishable consumables, assure the consumer of reliable, timely, and consistent deliveries.  That basically removes price from the equation.

Third, price is rarely the final determinant in most online transactions anyway. Because most of the sites have real-time price adjustment and matching algorithms which virtually eliminate material differences in the prices of comparable items. No one wants to deal with, or negotiate the prices of items they regularly purchase. They are far more concerned with availability and speed of delivery - and, of course, they believe that their time is typically more important to them than a few incremental dollars. In fact, the smoother and quicker the initial transaction, the more likely the buyer is to add additional items to the cart. And it's become apparent as well that the faster you can deliver after the purchase, the more the consumer will buy from you. Near instant gratification is a powerful and addictive element of the overall web experience and a crucial component of the dopamine culture.   

One final thought. In the old, pre-web days, consumers had many needs and few choices. It was a local seller's market. The most obvious example of the changes is probably the newspaper business where news, ads, classifieds and sports were all historically geo-bound. But, by the end of this year, one-third of the newspapers in the U.S. as of 2005 will be gone. Local retail,  having shakily survived the development and impact of major shopping malls in many communities, is probably next on the chopping block.

Today, the whole world is just a click away and buyers have infinite choices but little time, and even less loyalty. Time is the scarcest commodity and the winning merchants will build and optimize every aspect of their online presences to streamline, simplify, and speed purchases to make the sales process as quick, productive and painless as possible. Trying to lock them in through loyalty and reward programs, subscription incentives, and "secret" sales of premium brands and also overstock inventory are all short-term solutions.

Even then, consumers whose expectations are perpetually progressive will continue to ask "what have you done for me lately" and will seek out the best and most effortless experiences - regardless of the provider.  They remain loyal only until they find something better. They may stick around due to other constraints, lack of alternatives, and practical considerations that drive frequency and repeated purchases, but these limitations shouldn't be confused with loyalty or true preference. If you want your customers to keep coming back, you've got to try to be the best in the business and Amazon is currently the gold standard.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Why Tech Isn't Improving Your Advertising

The algorithm may have taken over the ad buying, but there's still no telling exactly who is watching your messaging.

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@HOWARDTULLMAN1

 

Every entrepreneur will tell you that they absolutely hate to spend any of their scarce cash on advertising, for two main reasons. First, they're not sure that ads work-- there's a lot of "spray and pray" going on and not much in the way of credible measurement or tangible results. Second, they believe that their product or service is so great that people should simply be flocking to their doors to buy whatever they're selling. They think that, if you use your money to create exceptional products and services, you won't need to spend on advertising.

If only life were that fair or entrepreneurs were a little more realistic. For some businesses, advertising is the cost of being boring.  For others, it's an attempt to put lipstick on a pig. But at the end of the day, there's really not much choice. It's like dancing with a bear - you don't get to stop when you want to.

This antipathy is hardly an attitude limited to new business builders. The advertising industry has always known that, while everyone wants to make money, no one really wants to buy advertising. On its best day, advertising is a necessary evil and - much like cable television or insurance - always a grudge buy. Even worse, the advent of new technologies, which in other industries have dramatically improved transparency, productivity, and accountability, have only added more confusion, uncertainty, and imprecision to the ad game.

Advertising follows audiences, but with programmatic algorithms dictating the placement, frequency, and duration of digital ads, no one knows much of what's happening in the field. Claims about the effective addressability of digital ads are mostly optimistic fantasies clothed in the belief that the underlying tech will somehow get the job done. As John Wanamaker said long ago: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half." Some things never change.

While some new companies like Dumbstruck can help advertisers determine whether the content of their ads is going to be effective, it's still anybody's guess as to whether you're getting your ads in front of the right buying audience at the right time and place. Context, given the abundant noise and clutter, is just as important as content, if not more so. Smart reach is still the name of the game and, as the migration from linear TV to digital video accelerates, determining whether ads are reaching the right folks, resonating with them, and driving purchase behavior is becoming increasingly difficult.  Average daily TV time is down from 3.5 hours a day in 2020 to less than 3 hours a day in 2023 while daily digital video viewing has grown by almost that exact amount from 2.5 hours a day to almost 3 hours a day in 2023.

As a result, linear TV ad spending has been flat to down over the last four years (stuck in the mid-$60 billions) and, even in an election year, there's not much enthusiasm for 2024. But, at least in the old days of traditional TV, you could sometimes see your ads running on the tube, while these days no one has any idea where their digital placements are showing up, what they're adjacent to, and who's seeing them. X (formerly Twitter and soon to be toast) is the most visible poster child for the risks of having no control and no say over what some algo decides to position next to your offerings. But the whole industry is now driven in large part by fraudulent next-gen click bait systems designed to attract programmatic ads.  These MFA programs have led to an environment where one in five links is to a fake site delivering made-up facts, phony health products, or pathetic financial pitches.  

That's no problem if you're targeting kids up to age 18, because since  TikTok and YouTube completely own the video market, the choices are pretty much locked in,  and frankly the advertisers focusing on these kids don't really care about quality engagement or first-party data. It's all about tonnage. TikTok's ad business is growing about twice as fast as Meta's and almost 4x faster - year over year - than Alphabet's. And because of TikTok's delivery methodology and typical video duration,  cost-per-view to advertisers is a fraction of what they have been paying for decades in more traditional channels.

But for mature and serious businesses seeking to actually connect to real human beings who are interested in learning about and ultimately purchasing their products and services, the problem is much more complex and challenging. TikTok isn't going to get the job done, but new ancillary networks are being built which make much more sense for serious advertisers. The most attractive of these are the retail media networks being developed by merchants like Walgreens, Kroger-Albertsons, and Walmart. They have extensive first-party data about their customers, strong and recurrent connections to them, and relatively high-quality engagement. But they lack the massive scale of players like Netflix. However, in combination, they can provide a solution which also offers levels of addressability, measurement and accountability that the digital vendors can't yet duplicate or effectively compete with.

The bottom line is pretty simple. As attractive and rapid as the newest delivery and tracking ad technologies may seem, as the ad buyer you're being asked to put far too much trust and money in "take my word for it" systems where the results are machine-driven and fundamentally unmeasurable. A much better bet is to take a step back and use channels and vendors whose methodology and mechanics are clear, understandable and auditable in more concrete and convincing ways.

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS BRAND ISSUES

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE 

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

You Need to Reimagine How You Market Your Brand

Some of the big names in consumer products are losing share because they can no longer demonstrate that they deserve a price premium. Make sure you're doing the right things to communicate your product's value.

 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@HOWARDTULLMAN1

 

Brands just aren't bringing it and getting the job done any longer. They used to represent a shorthand promise based on the simple premise that you could have basic confidence that you were getting more value for your spend even if you paid a premium for the privilege. That could be in the form of quality, durability, safety, ingredients or efficacy -- but we all believed for decades that something made a brand worth the additional investment. Brands were also an efficient way to address decision fatigue given the virtually unlimited shopping and product choices on the web today.

But now it seems that only those people (entertainers, influencers, gangbangers) who are utterly indifferent to price are still spending and sporting the top few big-name brands for reasons having much more to do with reputation, endorsement payouts and bragging rights than with any connection to reality. The world's wearing Apple watches these days while the jocks and party people are still sporting their diamond-encrusted Rolexes. We're never going to entirely eliminate the ancillary messaging and emotional considerations that accompany upscale brands that have little or nothing to do with function or features, but the days of blindly buying a premium brand for practical, prudent, and economic reasons are long gone for most products.

When you read investigative articles that suggest the private label brands at Costco or Walmart are being manufactured on the sly by the same makers of the branded goods, it's more than unsettling - it's a wake-up call. People aren't panting any more to pay up for products that are functionally indistinguishable from the private labels and even generics, which are being increasingly pushed by the large retail chains. We're seeing this all over the place, but especially with respect to the multi-billion-dollar marketplace for over-the-counter medications. 

Millions of consumers don't believe in much of anything these days, and the MAGAts only believe Trump, largely due to his eight-year assault on the truth. Brand names are just one important casualty. The Trumpist war on truth and medicine throughout the pandemic--which cost them tens of thousands of dead Red voters -- has really diminished consumer confidence in doctors and drugs in general. Drugs aren't the whole story, but they're a great early indicator of consumer brand behavior. As more and more products become confusingly similar and make identical claims regarding effectiveness, price rather than brand drives the decision bus.

There are several explanations for these new customer attitudes toward OTC medications that will eventually impact the future viability of every major brand. The players who react and adapt to the new environment and change their brand messaging, product offerings and customer interactions will survive and grow; those who choose to rest on their laurels and past performance will ride their brands right into the ground. Kraft Heinz's lousy results, even with higher prices, meant a newly-announced CEO. There's still time now - although Big Pharma doesn't seem to get the picture - and soon there will be plenty of blame for the losers and also-rans to spread around.

You could put part of the blame on the pharma companies themselves for clear and repeated price gouging, which the side-by-side comparative displays at Walgreens or CVS make abundantly clear to even the most obtuse observer. Wanna spend three bucks more for a bottle of Bayer aspirin or a tube of Neosporin for absolutely no good reason? Be my guest.

Of course, now that Walgreens has decided in its newest urban stores to hide virtually everything in closed cages or back-of-house, and to use kiosks and clerks to fill orders, maybe these awkward comparisons, which actually helped to educate the consumer, will disappear. That would be unfortunate but at least it won't kill the instant, internet-enabled, comparison pricing for virtually anything that's going on in every store. This smartphone-based smart shopping certainly hasn't made life any easier for the big brands.

Whatever your budget constraints may be, no one wants to look foolish or feel that they're being gouged. Mark Cuban's amazing new initiative - Cost Plus Drugs continues to gain traction and Amazon is jumping aggressively into the pharmacy business as well, which will clearly help drive drug prices down. It's no accident that Blue Shield California has announced plans to work with Amazon, Cuban and CVS on a new distribution system. President Biden's action in locking down the price of insulin for millions of patients is another amazing step forward.

You could say that the panache of pharma brands has been hard to polish and promote when there's so much noise in traditional broadcast channels, where every other ad is for some disease like TED, RVS or AMD that no one's ever heard of. These voluminous ads are clearly targeted to the few ancient and infirm people still watching the tube.  Ever since the success of the "purple pill" promotion, you no longer see the long-recognizable corporate names in their TV ads. The message is all about some made-up catchy name extracted by an overpaid ad agency from the drug's technical designation. Doctors now constantly complain that their patients no longer want diagnoses, they just want the pill with the cute name or the one that makes the fat go away.

And while cable subscriptions are largely a function of consumer inertia, the streamers are spending millions to try to move subscribers upstream to more expensive, ad-free tiers. They're telling the whole world that ads are worthless interruptions and an utter waste of time. In many ways, the bipolar ad industry is eating its own lunch and making its future prospects even more uncertain.

The clear implication in all this anti-ad messaging is that only morons and the poor have to suffer through dozens of ads every day in order to watch reruns, repetitive ad flights, and pitches for old people. Someone recently said that - given the average age of its audience - CBS now stands for "Could Be Sleeping."  And that it's really no harm, no foul if you should happen to nod off because in the online, all the time, connected world there's really nothing new about the nightly news. 

The message being sent to new generations of prospective viewers (and, obviously, consumers) is that all of the ads on traditional broadcast channels, cable stations, and even on much of the new and inexpensive offerings by the streamers are worthless wastes of their time and attention. As we enter the 2024 election ad cycle and suffer through the noise and clutter and the indiscriminate spray-and-pray ugliness, the situation will only worsen for the next 14 months, along with the ability of even the biggest brands to break through.

The bottom line for every business is that - while building and sustaining your brand will be important and challenging - it's even more critical to give your customers (past, present, and prospective) concrete reasons to continue to purchase, use and support your products and services.

Two key things to keep in mind:

(1)    Your team members will be essential to this process because people increasingly will be more likely to trust your employees, their interactions with them, and their suggestions and recommendations than anything else. Successful sales will always be a people business.  

(2)    Businesses and their brands in the future are going to have to have and successfully communicate to the world a purpose beyond profit in order to connect to tomorrow's consumers.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Walgreens Whiffs by Trying to Dodge the Truth

Companies and consumers are caught in a political spitting contest when most of the time they simply want to sell and buy everyday products.

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

It’s becoming harder and harder for businesses to try to properly position, present, and then justify their day-to-day operating decisions (not to mention new initiatives, experiments and store designs) to their actual customers -- the vast majority of basically middle-of-the-road people who just want to get on with their lives and don’t regard every purchase they make as conscious and intentional demonstrations of strident political statements and positions. Sometimes a rose is just a rose, coffee’s just a cuppa, and having a beer and a brat isn’t burdened by momentous political concerns. That’s why most businesses--large and small -- try to stay as far away from politics as possible and encourage their employees to do the same,  at least at work. The very best place to leave your politics is at the office door.

When you look at things more closely, these so-called social and political “problems” are rarely the serious concerns of customers or consumers -- those folks are all about business as usual--not that they ever mind watching a stupid cat fight from time to time. The problems for most companies -- Anheuser Busch, Target, Major League Baseball -- flow from the constant noise, nagging, and nuisance of the crazy shit-disturbers on both sides of whatever the latest Fox-flogged installment of bogus concern and flatulent outrage happens to be.  Their painful posturing and fake outrage are then amplified by the click-crazy media and quickly spread across social media by people with a lot of anger, angst, and aggression and not much else to do with their time. But if you aren’t careful, their simplistic and baseless slanders can still slime your business.

 The insurmountable challenge -- much like any debate with your teenage children -- is that there’s no right answer or remedy sufficient to satisfy people who are invested in and enjoying the tumult, who thrive by surfing the strife, and who haven’t the slightest interest in any reasonable discussion or resolution. Much like the MAGAt morons in Congress, the mess and the misery, the distraction and disruption, and the colossal wastes of time and energy are the entire point of the exercise.   

So, it’s almost impossible for even the best-intentioned managers, as they try to run their companies, to successfully navigate the increasingly perilous path between the deluded debaters, the drop-in dilettantes, and the dishonest disrupters. For sure, you don’t want these outsiders influencing or interfering with the way you run your business.  But too often one unfortunate result-- knowing that these idiots are out there-- is a kind of paralysis that sets in and gets in the way of innovation, risk taking, and forward motion.

 That’s not a happy result for anyone, but there are actually worse, self-inflicted things that can happen to your company if you’re not careful. One of the worst mistakes any owner or manager can make is to lie to themselves and to their employees and customers. This happens so often lately because of the treacherous tension between political correctness, the pressure and fear of false and critical social media, and the continuing need for authenticity.

The only right approach in these cases is to tell the truth and tell it like it is. This is a lesson that Walgreens among plenty of other businesses clearly hasn’t learned. Half a lie is still a lie and the whole truth is the only thing that stands the test of time and gets the job done.

 In the latest case, Walgreens introduced a new concept store in Chicago with only two aisles of basic products for shoppers to peruse while the rest of the merchandise is securely out of sight. With a perfectly straight face, while the entire world knows that retail stores are being flagrantly ripped off daily, Walgreens claimed that the new format is an experiment in digital-first merchandising to “benefit” customers. Not, mind you, to benefit customers by reducing shrinkage to avoid raising prices or closing the store entirely, but so that customers could order online for pickup or order in-store at kiosks. And, to make things worse, Walgreens’ messaging specifically said that the new design had nothing to do with anti-theft measures that every other retailer in the country has implemented. This was a complete lie and an attempt to head off the obvious, expected noise from the usual suspects.

When the laughing died down, Walgreens’ management looked like complete idiots. Worse yet, their PR positioning didn’t work for a minute. Regular customers were inconvenienced, obviously unhappy, and insulted and offended by Walgreens transparent explanation. Of course, the haters immediately turned out to cry racism and discrimination. So, in short order, the company managed to make everyone unhappy.

 More importantly, Walgreens sacrificed a great deal of their customers’ hard-earned goodwill and the trust of the community as well. It’s clear that the alternative to telling the truth, even when the truth hurts, is a walk down the thankless path of trying to please a bunch of hypocrites and pro forma protestors while you fail to speak frankly and honestly to the people who count - your customers.  And equally importantly, you’re lying to your employees, who have a very serious stake in this conversation. Everyone understands that retail theft has reached epidemic levels, especially when “justified and explained” by naïve and manipulative politicians like the new mayor in Chicago. No one doubts the need for the stores to take appropriate actions to stop the bleeding.

The front line of defense, and the people most often in harm’s way of these assorted criminals, including organized shoplifting rings,  are team members, not the suits sitting back in the corporate offices. Telling these folks, mainly for insurance reasons, to do nothing to prevent the thefts; to ignore crooks and creeps running from the stores with bags full of merchandise; and to stand down while these arrogant assholes taunt them and make fools out of the paying customers isn’t a solution.  This policy is just the latest concession to the rampant crime we’re seeing in many major cities and the inability of their political leaders to do anything to confront or change the situation. The pols are encouraging the thieves to keep it up and this puts the employees at even greater risk which is what’s driving major retailers like Nordstroms and Walmart out of various downtown areas.

 If consumer trust and confidence in the honesty and sincerity of our leaders in every area of business, law and government isn’t already at historic lows, the weak and dishonest efforts like these by Walgreens to try to avoid having forthright and open conversations with all the stakeholders about what needs to be done and what actions can be taken just makes the situation worse.

 A lie may fool someone else, but it tells the truth about you.

 

 

CRAIN'S OP ED BY HOWARD TULLMAN: JOHNSON NEEDS TO RETHINK HIS MESSAGE TO BIZ

 

Opinion: As Guggenheim eyes the exit, Johnson needs to rethink his message to biz

HOWARD A. TULLMAN

• 
  

Bloomberg

That train we see leaving town (most recently with Guggenheim Partners jumping onboard) should be a message and a warning to our new mayor that the tech and business community exodus that started with Lori Lightfoot when she aggressively turned her back on the entire business community is moving forward at light speed.

Companies of all sizes are leaving the city and the state and voting with their feet as they seek out safer, more corporate-friendly and better-managed communities for their people and their businesses. Someone needs to reach out in a hurry to try to stem this tide, or we won’t have much of a central business district or an economy left in Chicago. But the confused and hostile messaging the mayor-to-be has promoted has done exactly the opposite of what is desperately needed.

The COVID pandemic and the largely irrevocable behavioral changes it precipitated have provided a convenient excuse for two or three different kinds of corporate action that in earlier times were simply not viable alternatives given the likely civic and political blowback that they risked.

Shrinking or entirely abandoning substantial downtown office spaces in the name of a newly liberated workforce that wants to work from home is one example. Threatening to tax those commuters who were planning to come back into the city for work is a stupid start if the goal is to rebuild a thriving central business district.

Another ongoing corporate process — not bothering to rehire entire middle-level tiers of white-collar workers — especially of a certain age — because the tasks they previously performed have been outsourced, compressed by new AI-driven tools like ChatGPT, or entirely eliminated by automation — turns out to be convenient cover for headcount shrinkage. It's also a conversion of large segments of the workforce from fixed infrastructure costs into variable and often outsourced expenses. These conversions have direct and highly attractive impacts on the bottom line. Instituting an employee head tax is exactly the worst kind of incentive we need to try to encourage new entrants and retain the few big businesses we still have.

And excusing, explaining and providing rationalizations for shoplifting and the wanton weekend trashing of city buses and police cars as well as looting of downtown stores so that we don’t “demonize” the perpetrators is an invitation to a summer full of mischief and mayhem that will help make sure downtown restaurants and hotels suffer from the tourist drought that has threatened their very existences for the last several years.

When small stores and food outlets in the Loop close their doors at 3 or 4 in the afternoon and forfeit what little homebound commuter traffic there might have been to avoid the risks of staying open, the message should be clear to even the most oblivious observers. The city’s simply not the place to be after dark. When big stores like Walmart and Target start to determine whether it even makes sense to keep stores open in certain parts of the city, we know that we are on the cusp of even more challenging times.

But to return to the ongoing departure of so many of the major firms in the city in the direct and indirect ways they are hollowing out their offices, warehouses and other activities — there’s an even bigger and far more impactful problem with their disappearance. Many of these firms were the exact organizations, enterprises and entities that funded, supported, supplied manpower to and otherwise encouraged and enhanced the very essential civic, charitable, religious and philanthropic activities designed to serve and underwrite the exact underserved populations that the new mayor says are so critically in need of assistance. As these companies, their people and focuses shift to other parts of the country, Chicago will be much the worse for their leaving in ways that simple headcount and revenue numbers can’t begin to calculate. 

Howard A. Tullman is general managing partner of G2T3V, a Chicago-based investment/venture capital firm. He is the former CEO of tech incubator 1871. 

1871's ELISA ALL (30 SECOND MOBILE) JOINS P&G "COURAGEOUSNESS IN THE WORKPLACE" PANEL

The panel included Karenann Terrell, CTO of Walmart, Laura Desmond, CEO of Starcom MediaVest, Joanne Bradford, Head of Partnerships at Pinterest, and Julie Eddleman, Brand Operations Director at P&G.