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Sam's Club | Fortune

Sam's Club Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Dave Clark, Founder and CEO, Auger Sanjay Radhakrishnan, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Sam's Club Moderator: Jason Del Rey, Tech Correspondent, Fortune, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm AI

Brainstorm AI 2024: Smart Supply, Smarter Store

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Dave Clark, Founder and CEO, Auger Sanjay Radhakrishnan, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Sam's Club, Jason Del Rey, Tech Correspondent, Fortune, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm AI

I like it. Who was that? Oh Yeah, I like it a lot. When I hear supply chain, I do the same thing every morning, every morning, Dave, it's great to be on stage together. Now that you're out of a zone, you're, you're allowed to do this. I'm totally unburdened by what it's been. Make your, I'm a founder. I could say any kind of crazy shit. I feel like today. I mean, beside it perfect. And I said I, I come in the jacket and uh I have two great looking gentlemen, but in a little more casual attire. So whoever told me to wear a jacket, you're fired. Um Sanjay, great to meet you as well and have you up here. Um I guess we should actually talk about the content, right? So Dave, I'm going to start with you um over 20 years at Amazon most recently as we know consumer ceo um you've now raised $100 million and I think you're calling it the series a round for a new start up uh focused on creating an operating system for supply chain software. Uh Can you explain a little bit of what is going wrong in the supply chain space and how A I plays a role in solutions. Well, you know, there's been a tremendous amount of investment in this space for decades and especially through COVID, there was a tremendous amount of money that went into the space. But, and so you have a lot of interesting niche players that are there. Right. So most everybody runs an, er, P software and then they run a half dozen or a dozen other software that does demand planning and transportation management, what have you but they don't talk to each other. And so you're left in this world where everything you know, is sort of output an answer and they have to post process this in some form of Excel or Tableau or smart sheets or something uh with the teams of analysts to try to come up with an execution plan. And our intent is to basically go in and allow them to be able to connect all these systems in an integrated way. So you can actually operate the Indian supply chain uh in a longitudinal continuum as opposed to what they're doing today. And supply chains are always global supply chains, at least always difficult with uh circumstances arising out of your control, right? And sometimes uh political related uh other times, maybe a global health crisis. Now, you know, we have with the Trump administration coming in some questions of what tariffs might look like. Are there solutions? Out. Are you hoping that part of the solution that you're building is something where you take a little bit of the uncertainty or at least planning uh in a more succinct way? Well, I can tell you like, e every, every supply most, every supply chain professional around right now is trying to answer the question for somebody, their board or the CEO or somebody said, hey, if tariffs go to X, what, what happens to our supply chain? Like do we need to re do we need to change the who our supplier is? What does our, our flow need to look like? What does their inventory look like? What are the ramifications of, you know, country X putting another an alternative rule in place that blocks something else and you know, everybody's, you know, everybody's using chat G BT or something and getting an answer really quick and they wanna know why the hell their supply chain leader can't come back with this answer. Meanwhile, there's 50 people grinding out spreadsheets trying to come up with these answers. A and what we wanna do is try to is we wanna get all that data in one place so that you could actually ask those questions. And this is where the, you know, the larger models I think will really help us is getting the full data set together, which frankly most companies, you know, maybe Sam's Club excluded and Walmart, you know, outside these big companies with large technical infrastructure really don't have the ability to, to get their data in one place to ask those questions and to run scenarios with lots of alternatives in them, to get a better view of what might be in certain outcomes or what your decision choices could be given a set of potential out. So as part of your whole wish that you're, I, I know you're building the technology right now, but this would be a perfect time to launch. Well, the, the one thing about supply chain is that there's always something going wrong somewhere. So I'm not particularly worried about it. Like uh I've been a supply chain for 20 some odd years and every day is just another cluster of some kind. You can finish that term if you want. OK, you trying to be friendly. But the it is a, every day is some form of mess. It's just what is the mess and where is the mess and who created it? And how do you figure out how to get out of it? And uh you know, I, I, I've been in this a long time and know the pain that operators face every day. And we just, we want to try to find a way to make that uh a, a simpler, simpler uh set of choices for people. So they can really focus on the strategic outcomes uh as opposed to just answering, answering questions for the boss and Sandra. Um I know you have some supply chain background, but I wanted to shift gears a little bit to your role at Sam's. And I've always been fascinated with Sam's Club. I don't know how many people know, but Sam's Club is often the breeding ground for technology progress and innovations inside the Greater Walmart Company. And then often technologies go from testing in Sam's and then scaling to Walmart proper as I call it or the Super Centers Network, we've had a ton of talk about gen A I capabilities, but Sam's club is using different types of A I both in, in helping consumers sort of re reduce some friction in the stores. And also when your products do get through the supply chain challenges and get to your stores, making sure they stay there, they stay in stock. Can you just tell the audience a little bit about what innovations are working for you right now as in regards to A I powered solutions? Yeah, it's great to be here with all of you. Um What I'll say is that we as a company, we are a people led tech powered omni channel retailer. So at Sam's Club, we have over 600 clubs spread across the US and Puerto Rico and we have learned that to win over time, we really need to listen to our members and figure out how to use technology to anticipate and meet their needs. So, um we've been doing this for a long time, uh listening to our member feedback and figuring out how can we use that to make your shopping experience more frictionless in the, in the clubs? And what's number, what's number one on that list? Yes. So number one on that list, few years ago, we got feedback from our members that, you know, waiting in the checkout lanes with the cash registers with a huge pain point. So we delivered this mobile capability called Scan and Go. It's available in the Sam's Club mobile app. Our members can actually walk into the club, open the Sam's Club mobile app, just start adding items to the cart slide to pay and head to the door. Now, when they hit the door, they do have a friction point because you have an associate at the door waiting to check the purchase receipt. So we got feedback from our members that that's additional friction that they would like us to help solve. And so we have come up with this technology called Sas Exit. And it's essentially a combination of computer vision and artificial intelligence that kind of works seamlessly to validate our member purchases and then allows them to exit the club friction free. So for people who haven't seen it, can you just describe there's, is it an arch with cameras overhead or? Yeah. So if you, as you head to the exit of a Sam's club, you'll see an archway and the archway has cameras in it as you walk through that archway, the cameras are taking images of the member's car. Then our CD models kick in to identify items in the cart which is done through feature extraction. So we are looking for things like size, shape, color logos, brands and cross referencing it with our inventory catalog. And once we identify the items in the cart, then we are looking for the receipts from our point of sale system and trying to match the items on the cart to a receipt once we have that match, and this is all in how, in how many seconds it's all happening near real time, real time, right? So you can think about a club where you have the archway is right before the door. So you have a few seconds before the uh the member can exit the club. So in a matter of a few seconds, we do that real time validation and send a signal to the associates standing at the, at the door that, hey, everything looks good and the member walks friction free. This technology is actually rolled out across all of our 600 clubs. And we are seeing that our members can exit at a rate of 75% completely friction free. And it's a huge member satisfaction booster for us. Our exit experience NPS scores are close to a 90. And what it is also doing is it actually giving time back to our associates in the front of the store so that they can use that time and spend, spend it with the members and make sure that the shopping experience is not like I had one question about that because I heard the 75% number and that's more than half, that's a big number. I can do math up here too. And at the same time, that means it's not 100. Right. And so there's a staff member waiting. So I'm curious like when you think of productivity is that one, is that person doing other things when they're not, you know, checking out or they I'm assuming they're still standing by. So I'm just curious how you think about the labor dynamic there? Yeah, I mean, really the role of that uh associate standing at the end of the club, it's transforming to actually greeting the member, thanking the member for your service and, and telling the member that we appreciate the business, right? So the tech that we are deploying actually helps us in that journey because where previously they used to check every receipt now they are actually spending, you know, 75% of time back and they are using that time to actually greet the member and show them that we trust them and we are not judging them and we are creating a shopping environment that is actually more pleasant and trustworthy. I'm gonna come to the audience for questions. I don't know if we have any right now. Otherwise I'll come back. Otherwise I'm gonna, I have no shame in calling on folks that I know in the room. So, um maybe right here. Uh So I on the labor point and, and Dave, I'm curious for your take on this too. Um Obviously, when I, when I hear these discussions or taking part in these discussions, productivity, that word, I even used it. I'm surprised myself. Productivity comes up and automation comes up and there's a natural labor question, Dave, I'm I'm curious with the development of the operating system, you're talking about like how much as you start to talk to clients is labor something they want to solve for. Um And just how do you think about the impact of what you're trying to build on workforces of your, your end clients? And I think you get to look at companies that are always trying to take cost out of the system. Are you trying to improve service levels at lower costs and the big cost drivers for most companies? I mean, labor is a big chunk of that. But when you look at cogs transport, like there's a lot of other costs in there that tend to be bigger frankly than a lot of the the unitized labor costs. Um particularly when you start talking about things you can automate out. And so from for what we're building, it's much more about reducing the overall cogs in the system. So taking working capital out by improving terms, you know, getting cycle times faster, pulling inventory waste out of the system is a much greater sort of driver of bottom line impact to most organizations unless you, you know, unless you're really talking to wholesale fundamental uh sort of labor redeployments in some form. So for us, it's much more about working capital, lead time adjustments, transportation optimization. We think there's a lot, I think there's a lot more interesting dollars and in that space and right now than there is in labor, the robotics is gonna drive a ton of labor uh savings in that over time. But, you know, our focus is really about the much more of the working capital utilization and transport. And is that also what you're hearing from, you know, fortune 2000 companies or they, or, or maybe in public, they say that. But, you know, when you're in a room just with the chief supply chain of they want both. Like, I mean, everybody wants everything right, like, you know, everybody wants to give customers everything and extract the maximum cost out of the system. And so, you know, there's always this, you know, unfortunately, we've made productivity a bit of a dirty word and, and, you know, we sort of make these, you know, taking, you know, we've had productivity things in place for 100 you know, for a long time, we have humans and we keep finding new and better ways to engage the, you know, people and people's brains and what people do for a living. And I think we're gonna continue to do that. So I'm personally not, I think we, you know, there's too much hand wringing over that and worry about it. Uh But I think when I look at supply chains, the labor savings is interesting but the total end to end waste and sort of overproduction under utilization and transport. Um you know, lack of forecasting capabilities, all those things that both planetary waste, human waste and cost dramatically outweighs uh what the opportunities are and sort of front line labor safe. Do you have any questions in the room? I'll keep going. Nothing yet. I'm going to call on someone. I will. Uh Sandra I another technology I know you all are, are have been talking about. That's A I powered is um you have what, what I think used to be called scrubbers, basically um mobile robots that Queen Queen, the the clubs and attach them. Now, I think is it in some stores or all stores? Um Our cameras also and these are helping with sort of out of stock issues and just giving more knowledge to employees on inventory. Is that, do I have that Moly? Correct? Yeah, you have it right. So um uh Josh inventory management in a physical retail environment is extremely complex, right? Because things move around all the time. So a few years back, um we fitted our autonomous scrubbers with cameras and these scrubbers traverse the aisles of our clubs, taking pictures of merchandise on the shelf. We take an average of 24 million images a day and we have CV and A I models that actually extract information out of these images and convert them into insights and inventory intelligence that we feed back into systems that our club associates use in their handhelds and we use it to drive the next best action for our club associates. So for example, if our members Mark Peanuts is running low on the shelves, we can actually generate a signal to our associates to drive a restocking action. Or if the price sign is incorrect or if price sign has fallen down, we can drive actions to our associates to go fix it. We also use it to actually update locations of items so that the next time the associate wants to find that item, it's, it's much easier and we can send them to the right location. We have also added RFID readers to the scrubbers. So as they traverse the aisles, they are reading on average 180 million tag reads a day. And we can drive actions like if the small size of a T shirt is running low on the apparel rack. But we find that inventory is sitting in a box below the rack, we can drive a restocking action and ask the associates to go restock the small size T shirt back on the shelf, right. So using these solutions, these inventory management solutions with A I models and some other innovations, we have eliminated in excess of 100 million tasks from our associates lives in the clubs. And that's time back to our associates to spend with our members on the floor. I just want to make sure I heard you correct. 100 million, 100 million tasks. I'm I'm trying to, trying to think of how, how a role could have that many times or this across different roles in the club, across different roles in the club. Got it. Um One more, one more call for questions. No, you're my man. Can you tell us who you are and where, where are you from? Oh yeah. Right. Oh Yeah, right. Here in the front, we have a microphone, we can hand this gentleman, the mic runners gave up. Uh Yeah, yeah, we can. Do you, do you mind standing up? OK. What was the friction from your associates when you were employing this technology? Because there's always friction as new technology gets deployed, especially for lower skill workers. Yeah. What I'll say is um we've done this enough that we know how to roll and roll out and manage through the change management. So we have different um environments uh at the home office kind of lab like environments where they can simulate activities like this. And then we have smaller size clubs where there is like there are members coming in and shopping, but it's a much smaller scale club where we can actually start off and run the first pilot. Uh We also have the option to actually run some pilots on a couple of aisles. And so we have a mechanism to kind of kind of slowly bleed this in, test it out with our home office associates first, then take it to one club, a small size club, then take it to a larger club and then test it and then roll it out to scale. So change management is, is an issue. But we have done this for a while that we have uh uh you know, figured it out. Um on that, on that topic, I'm always curious how you go about and Dave maybe from Flexport or Amazon experience might have some thoughts as well. How you go about getting real transparent, sorry, real candid answers from employees about how new technologies are impacting them for better or worse. And there might be more, more willing to give the open uh the positive answers, right? But if there's a manager or several layers of management between them and whoever's receiving the answers. Um uh My, my experience with the opposite of that, which is usually you can get the negative feedback really quickly. The positive feedback started again, completely agree. Feedback is, I mean, our club associates know how to do their job. So when we uh give them tech that works. We hear about it immediately when we give them tech that does not work, we hear about it really fast too. So they are very open with feedback. OK. Change is bad, even good change. And so a a anytime you roll out something, I mean, this is in my experience, no matter how phenomenal you are rolling it out, it is always bad for a little bit. And so you get the negative very quickly I find and, and, you know, the hard part is I found is working through, keep pushing through it to get to what, you know, what is fundamentally broken versus what, you know, what's just learning pains and, and being able to sort the difference and the one path is to execute it over, you know, sort of do the matsa, you know, step it up over time now, something bigger the other is burn the boats and throw it out there and everybody fig, you know, you only have one choice but to figure it out. Well, next time I live in the ladder in the ladder, burn the boats. I think next time, next conversation we're gonna have us on burning boats. Um, we're out of time now. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Sanjay.

Vinod Bidarkoppa, Senior Vice President, Walmart; Chief Technology Officer, Sam’s Club 
Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, Chief A.I. Officer, eBay
Rathi Murthy, Chief Technology Officer and President, Product and Technology, Expedia Group
Moderator: Rana el Kaliouby, Deputy CEO, Smart Eye; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm A.I.

Brainstorm A.I. 2022 - The Age Of Intent: Knowing What Customers Need Before They Do

Vinod Bidarkoppa, Sam’s Club 
Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, eBay
Rathi Murthy, Expedia Group
Moderator: Rana el Kaliouby, Fortune Brainstorm A.I.

Knowing What Customers Need Before They Do


Kathryn McLay, President and CEO, Sam's Club
Interviewer: Beth Kowitt, FORTUNE

MPW Summit 2020: Tales from the Front Lines

Kathryn McLay, President and CEO, Sam's Club

Uncategorized

Running Sam’s Club was already a massive job. Then the pandemic hit. We talk with Walmart’s Kathryn McLay about navigating her business through uncertainty and how COVID-19 is transforming the retail landscape.


Hi, I am fortunate Senior editor and M. P. W. Summit co chair Beth Co it. When the pandemic hit the news in habits of shoppers changed at a dramatic pace. Sam's club already an innovator and cloud commerce and mobile technology quickly pivoted, shifting the way it does business. Ceo Catherine McLay was only a few months into her job at the helm as the covid prices unfolded, Cat joins us now. Hey beth how you doing? I'm well, thank you so much for being with us. We really, we really appreciate you being here and I thought it would be helpful to get things started just to give a sense of the scale of your business. So Sam's Club, If it were a standalone retailer would be the 10th biggest retailer in the us, you'd be the number 58 on the Fortune 500. So, so this is a big, this is a big job and you took, you took over in November. So tell us a little bit about what you thought was going to be the hardest, the hardest piece of this new, this new role. It was interesting because I started in november and if you think about that time of year for retail, I mean that's like, that's showtime, you have thanksgiving, you've got like friday cyber monday if you lead into christmas, so I did kind of feel like I've been thrown in the deep end, like this was the moment of the year, um and then I kind of got through christmas and I was like, okay, he's going to take a step back. And then actually I ended up having this great big kind of change in my leadership team in january and february, so I thought, okay, we're back in the deep end, and then I thought, okay, we got through that and I'd set up my team and we're kind of going kind of into february and March and then the pandemic hit and all the rules of the game changed. So actually looking back those deep, like jumping in the deep end of the pool actually feels like it was kind of more the shallow end really in preparation for kind of what we hit in March. So how, tell us a little bit about how you had to shift your priorities, you know, what has really come into focus for you as you've dealt with the pandemic? No, the economic uncertainty, the fight for racial justice, you know what, what's justice? Yeah, so I'd probably break that into a few different groups. So I think primary through all of the safety of our associates and safety of our members was like the first thing that we had to kind of anchor around. Um, and so there's a lot of work, very tactical work in that first kind of few months to make sure that we were set up to be able to be kind of have an environment where people felt safe and there they were able to thrive. Um, but during all of that to were very intent that all of this disruption actually gave us an opportunity to kind of accelerate our strategy. So going into the year, I knew that I wanted to grow membership, I knew that I wanted to um fast forward kind of on the curbside and some of our omni um, areas. And I also knew I had this great product called scan and go which enabled contact less payment, which was which I got amazing ratings from members on. And so I think my three kind of ambitions and I kind of, I think the pandemic gave us some momentum behind our strategy. That was a little unexpected. So instead of creating the momentum, we were on the front of the wave and it was like, okay, so how do we use this momentum to really push forward? So I think like that was the subtle ship. And then the other part is from the moment we went to work from home, we had to come up with very different ways of working. And so as a new ceo with a relatively new leadership team, we set up this kind of rhythm of meeting every day for an hour and a half and probably for the first four weeks. That was that was really primary in making sure that we're aligned, We're making quick decisions and that we were like, I guess all on top of what we needed to know. And then as we kind of passed through the four weeks, we dropped off some of those meetings, but we've, we've retained that way of working. So we meet three times a week, it's the key leaders of the business. No power points, you know, agenda just like, okay, what are the things we need to make decisions on and as a leadership team that has really built trust that we're linemen and we move fast. So what, you know, you're back, I know they're doing store tours. Why are these so important? And give us a sense of the kinds of things that you've learned that you've, that you've implemented as a result of kind of being back on the back on the ground. Yeah, So I think store tour is one of the most powerful tools you have in retail. And so I think the day we decided to move as a company to work from home, I actually got on a plane that day and flew to Chicago and I toured and I'm so glad I did because there's no way of imagining what that was like in the retail outlet unless you were standing in there, I was standing in a club in Chicago and I mean that was in the heavy period of panic buying and I have to tell you they're standing in there amongst that with so many people in there and they, I guess the anxiety on people's faces as they were concerned about what the future was going to look like and their ability to be able to get access to product. Um, Normally, when I tour, I'm touring to look for with the opportunity, how I grow the business. Like, you know, what, how do we help this club manager really kind of move forward on that day? Um, I had intended to tour familiarity, right? How do I make sure that the clubs know that I'm here with? I can really kind of observe and learn. I actually think the first half an hour of that too, I was in the parking lot collecting cards because I mean there was so many members, that was what we were short of. So I was out there grabbing carts and pulling them into the vegetable, because, you know, at the end of the day, you know, that was the most important thing that they needed in that club at that moment. But you know, as we've moved through the month of the pandemic, I mean a lot of touring has given me insights into how we've needed to adapt to change. And you know, we I think from that first couple of weeks, one of the things that was really important to us was how do we build empathy and kindness into all of our communication? Because what we're seeing out in the community was that people were saying there's a lot of anxiety, there was a lot of um uncertain, yeah, uncertainty about the future. And so we said as a leadership team, okay, let's let's see that our voices one that helps bring unity, that helps bring hope, that helps people feel reassured. So there's so many, like, wonderful insights that you glean from being out in the field that you can bring back and then help, kind of um, informed direction. Yeah, so I think it's clear that, you know, you mentioned at the beginning how well Sam's Club is doing, a lot of big retailers are really just clearly going to be the winners in this, but I know that a lot of your customers are small businesses. I mean, do you how do you think of that and worry about that as you think toward the future? And what does post pandemic world will look like? Yeah. Yes. Small businesses really vital important. Part of SAM's club business and what we really saw in those first few months was that their business is contracted and in some places like those businesses were in hibernation. And so we've kept very close links with our small business members. Um we joined forces with Lisk on how can we set up some grants to support them uh, with the local initiatives? And then we also, we had every single club manager ring their top 50 small business members and just talk to them about, Okay, as you're thinking about setting your business back up, what do you need? How can we help you, how do we get you access to plexiglass? How do we get you access to masks and gloves? And what else do you need? Because I think the whole economy grows when small businesses strong, so we really wanted to be an enabler to help support them. So I asked your colleague, Judith McKenna and um Home Depot's Emory Campbell this question and I want to know that came from you. How are you expecting retail to change coming out of this? You know, what, what is permanent and what is just sort of a blip urged friend in your view, you can look different. Yeah, I think there are some things around the acceleration to Omni, which I think will remain. I think as I look at um during the pandemic, we moved to kind of curb side because we're hearing from our members, okay, you've got club pick up, but I still have to come into the club to get it and that's actually not that convenient. I want to be able to do it curbside and remain in the remain in my vehicle. All of that move to curb side I think is just giving convenience to the member that that will continue to grow and thrive. I think contact less payment. I think that is going to endure. You know, we have this product called scan and go, which is effectively like purchasing online, but you're in the club so you're scanning the item's as you're walking around and then you just swipe for your transaction and then you bypass the whole front end and you head out the door. And I think that form of like kind of being in control of your, of your customer journey. I think it's important to members. So those innovations I think will remain. Um, but I also think businesses have changed, like at the moment, like we're working remotely and that is enabling us to be able to go fast and it's enabling, you know, a degree of productivity, but I'm also seeing green shoots of innovation kind of coming from the ground up. So I want to make sure that we keep those parts that are really successful about this model and make sure even when we return to some quantity office environment that we that we don't lose, that, can you give us an example of that maybe some sort of innovation or something that you've seen crop out crop up out of all this that you think could take off? Well, I think two things recently which I was really excited about and both of them came from just people in the organization that saw a problem and they wanted to solve it themselves. So it's not even like it was on our way before we tasked someone to do it. The first one was, I've talked a little bit about scan and go, um, one of the things that we've struggled with it, sometimes people don't want to have to download, download the app onto their phone. And so this person had this idea of, well, what if we made it like a digital demo? So when you're in the club, you could can a QR code and it actually enables you to try an instance of scanning, go without downloading the app. And so this whole kind of digital demo kind of thought has kind of grown through kind of covid. The other one was our associates. When they come into the club have to do health screens and they have to do a temperature check. Well, you know, an associate was watching this and you had this line of people waiting to go through the health rain and b b um temperature checked. And they're like, we could integrate that using tech, but when the person scans on, they can go to a monitor and do a voice prompted scan, do a thermal scan on their risk of the temperature and it is totally unaided and you know, it's quick and you still get all the data and connectivity and that's just somebody standing there going, I see a problem and I can fix it and I love that. So this is this is the future. I like that. Um so I want to talk about your background for a second. So you joined walmart five years ago, um you moved from Australia, your native Australia. Probably people can tell uh for the job what has been the most difficult thing for you to get used to moving to the US. Either personally or professionally. Yeah, I think the thing that has surprised me most is how beautiful Bet and Bill is. So I came from Sydney, which is right on the coast. Um six million, roughly. About 5.5 million people. I lived in a small town in new Zealand of about 15,000. And I was coming to Ben villain, Bentonville is actually, I said the best of both worlds. So you have the safety of like this small town feel where my kids can kind of ride up and down the streets and then you have all the culture and the arts has been invested into this kind of northwest Arkansas area. That has been an absolute delight. The part probably the professional challenge has been how to get your head around operating on a scale, like walmart, like, I don't think anything can prepare you for that. So I had come from a company that had like, it was a $60 billion Walmart and it was like, Oh my goodness, this is a scale that I had not appreciated and and there's a different style of working to be able to work at that scale. Tell me a little, just give me a sense of how you do that. How did you wrap your head around that and, and kind of figure out how to really work in that environment? Yeah, so I think the benefit I had from coming from, a smaller retailer was, I knew how all the pieces fit together and so that enabled me to be able to see up and downstream consequences, but you have to go deep and you have to know who to draw in when you're operating at scale because, you know, a slight design fork and have exponential kind of impacts. And so you really need to embrace the complexity and make sure you're designing in a way that is going to be seamless when it gets executed. Great. Well embracing the complexity, it definitely seems like the message uh, for the moment. So Cat, thank you so much for joining us. You really, really appreciate you being here. Thank you Beth was lovely.

KATHRYN MCLAY: I think store tours is one of the most powerful tools you have in retail. And so I think the day we decided to move as a company to work from home, I actually got on a plane that day and flew to Chicago, and I toured. And I'm so glad I did, because there's no way of imagining what that was like in the retail outlet unless you were standing in there. I was standing in a club in Chicago, and that was in the heavy period of panic buying. And I have to tell you, Beth, standing in there amongst it with so many people in there-- and I guess the anxiety on people's faces as they were concerned about what the future was going to look like, and their ability to be able to get access to product. Normally when I tour, I'm touring to look for where's the opportunity? How do I grow the business? How do we help this club manager really kind of move forward? On that day, I had intended to tour for solidarity, right? How do I make sure that the clubs know that I'm here with them? I can really kind of observe and learn. I actually think the first half an hour of that tour, I was in the parking lot collecting carts. Because there were some members, and that was what we were short of. So I was out there grabbing carts and pulling them into the vestibule. Because at the end of the day, that was the most important thing that they needed in that club at that moment. But as we've moved through the months of the pandemic, a lot of touring has given me insights into how we've needed to adapt and change. And I think from that first couple of weeks, one of the things that was really important to us was how do we build empathy and kindness into all of our communication? Because what we were seeing out in the community was that people were struggling. There was a lot of anxiety, there was a lot of uncertainty about the future. And so we said as a leadership team, OK, let's see that our voice is one that helps bring unity. That helps bring hope. That helps people feel reassured. So there's so many wonderful insights that you glean from being out in the field that you can bring back and then help kind of inform direction. 

Kathryn McLay says the "store tour" was unlike any she'd ever experienced.

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