RETAIL

The future of retail is retail everywhere. The brand is the constant, the channel is the variable.

It's easier to teach a merchant about technology than to teach a technologist about retail.

Being online-only was great for year one. But 95% of glasses are still bought in stores. We had to meet customers where they are, which meant building stores.

The secret to retail is not selling things. It is buying things cheaper than anyone else and passing the savings to the customer.

Change or die. Those are the only two options in retail. If you are doing the same thing you did five years ago, you are already dead — you just don't know it yet.

We put the Beyond Burger in the meat aisle, not the health food section. If you want to change how people eat, you have to be where they already shop.

Walmart, Kroger, and Costco all stock Apeel-treated produce. When the world's biggest retailers adopt your technology, you know the science works.

DTC-only was a ceiling. Going into Whole Foods and Target gave us the scale we needed.

100+ retail stores. Everyone said DTC brands can't do physical retail. We proved them wrong.

Brands need to be seen. A storefront on Fifth Avenue is the most expensive billboard in the world — and it works.

Concentration works in markets. In retail, it's a different game. Customers don't care about your portfolio theory.

Sears had the best brand in American retail. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the customer.

I sold 2,500 units in 10 minutes on my first QVC appearance. That moment changed my life forever.

I can look at a product for 30 seconds and know if it'll sell. That's not magic. That's 25 years of selling on camera.

Shoprite feeds millions of Africans every day. That's not a business. That's infrastructure.

Africa has 1.4 billion people who need affordable food and goods. That's not a risk. That's a certainty.

Every brand we've bought, people said it was dead. They said Sports Direct was dead once. They were wrong then too.

Retail is arithmetic. You buy it for X and sell it for more than X. The companies that fail have forgotten the arithmetic.

The store is the classroom. You learn more in one day visiting stores than in a year reading spreadsheets.

The customer does not care about your stock price. The customer cares about whether the tomatoes are fresh.

Latin America is the most exciting retail market in the world. A billion people who want better lives.

I go to the stores because that is where the truth is. Not in the boardroom.

If a customer saves one euro with us, we have done our job.

The only sustainable competitive advantage in retail is being the cheapest.

We sell clothes. We do not sell stories about clothes. The price tag is the story.

A mall is not about shopping. It is about experience. People come for the experience and buy things along the way.

Our business is built on trust — trust between us and the global brands we represent, and trust with our customers in the Gulf.

We do not rush. We take time to understand a brand before we represent it. That discipline is what keeps our relationships lasting decades.

The Gulf is one of the most dynamic consumer markets in the world. Young populations, rising incomes, a love for international brands. It is a remarkable place to be in business.

Qatar is changing. The consumer here is sophisticated and global. Our job is to bring the world's best brands to our market at the highest standard.

The Internet is not a threat to our shopping malls. The Internet cannot replace the human experience of being somewhere.

Retail is dead only if you do not reinvent it. We chose to reinvent it around art and human experience.

Books are not just products. People have a relationship with them. That is the business we are really in.

You cannot compete with Amazon by being Amazon. You compete by being something Amazon cannot be.

Scale is not just a competitive advantage in retail. Scale is the business.

Sol Price taught me everything I know about retail. Everything. He was the most important business mind I ever encountered.

The membership fee is really the key to the whole thing. It means your customer has already committed to you before they even walked in.

The most important lesson dad taught us was to listen to your customers. Not just what they say — watch what they do.

Canada's families spend a significant portion of their income on food. Getting that right — the quality, the value, the access — is not a small thing. It is the obligation that comes with being Canada's largest food retailer.

President's Choice is not a discount brand. It is a quality brand at an accessible price. That distinction matters. Great food should not require a premium income.