June Brought Robots, BNPL Drama, and a $187B Wake-Up Call

Seven retail tech stories worth your time this month.

June 30, 2026

Hello Reader,


June's issue covers a lot of ground. The World Cup is turning into a retail media experiment at global scale. Convenience retailers are rethinking what a store visit looks like when an EV charging customer is parked for twenty minutes instead of two. AI is doing real work in c-stores. A family-owned grocer in Nebraska just handed thirty hours of weekly busywork to a robot. Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) is now influencing where people shop, not just how they pay. And two retail technology veterans are making the case that payments deserve the same scrutiny you give everything else. Let's get into it.

Cold Cases and Hot Takes on Dwell Time

This article takes a close look at cold case strategy in convenience retail, and the data on open versus closed coolers is very interesting. According to Structural Concepts/Kantar research cited in the piece, customers are 50% more likely to buy from an open cooler, spend about 10% less time in front of it, and spend roughly 11% more per trip. But the second half of the article is where it gets even more interesting: autonomous coolers are being deployed specifically at electric vehicle (EV)-heavy locations.

Expert POV from Jason Todd: For decades, the entire convenience retail model was engineered around speed. Get customers in, get them through the line, get them back on the road. Every fixture, every checkout lane, every cooler placement served that goal. Now a growing customer segment may be parked for twenty to thirty minutes, and that could change store layout, labor models, food strategy, loyalty, and more. Instead of asking “how do we get customers out in two minutes?”, retailers might need to start asking “What do we want customers to do with the next twenty minutes?”

The New Hire That Never Calls in Sick

Midwest family grocer B&R Stores, which operates banners including Russ's Market, Super Saver, and others across Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri, is deploying the Simbe store intelligence platform and Tally autonomous shelf-scanning robot at select locations in Lincoln. The retailer manages thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs) across fresh, center store, and specialty categories in a fast-moving environment. Store associates reportedly spend up to 30 hours per week on manual inventory tasks that are time-consuming, error-prone, and consistently cited as a top driver of associate attrition. Tally automates those tasks, capturing real-time shelf-level data on product availability, pricing, and placement, so associates can focus on replenishment, store execution, and customer service.

Our View: The real headline is not that a robot is scanning shelves; it is that thirty hours of associate time per week was being spent on a task that a machine can do more accurately and continuously. That time has real value. Redirecting it toward customer-facing work, store execution, and replenishment is exactly the kind of ROI that makes a technology investment defensible at any level of the organization. B&R is a family-owned operator, not a national chain with a massive tech budget, and that makes this deployment more meaningful as a signal of where the industry is heading.

Payments are Retail’s New Labor Problem

U.S. merchants paid $187 billion in payment processing fees in 2024. That number is growing nearly three times faster than payment volume itself. Jason Todd and Tim Webb, both with 25+ years in retail technology, make the case that it's time for retailers to pay serious attention to payments. That means no more automatic contract renewals with acquirers and processors, and a real shift toward modern, flexible architecture that creates negotiating leverage, keeps pace with compliance requirements, and prepares retailers for agentic commerce.

Podcast Pick: Behind the Counter with Jason Cole

In this episode of Behind the Counter, host Vicente Yañez sits down with Jason Cole, Head of Retail Strategy at Tote.ai, to talk about what it really means to be AI native, why legacy integration keeps slowing retail innovation down, and how convenience retailers can stop losing the customers who are already on their lot.

No BNPL, No Deal

According to PYMNTS Intelligence research surveying 2,763 U.S. consumers, Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) and merchant-offered installment plans are now a meaningful factor in where consumers choose to shop, not just how they pay once they get there. Financing availability carries the most influence in categories where consumers have real alternatives and time to compare: travel, food delivery, and experiences. It carries less weight in habit-driven, necessity categories like groceries and restaurants. Younger consumers are driving the shift most visibly, with millennials and Gen Z reporting materially higher sensitivity to financing availability across almost every category studied.

Our Take: BNPL is no longer a payment method you bolt on at checkout to close a transaction. For a growing segment of younger shoppers, it is part of how they decide where to shop in the first place. That makes it a customer acquisition tool as much as a payments tool, and it belongs in the same conversation as loyalty, personalization, and digital experience. Retailers who treat financing as purely a back-office function may find themselves losing consideration before a customer ever walks through the door.

AI Grows Up and Gets a Day Job

For years, AI in convenience retail felt like something reserved for large chains with deep pockets. That's changing fast. This piece profiles how operators of different sizes are putting AI to work right now, from Casey's using voice AI to handle phone orders to Huck's rolling out Tote.ai, an AI-native POS system. Operators are deploying AI differently, but almost all of them are using it to address the same underlying pressures around staffing, supply chain, and checkout speed.

Our View: Now that AI is actually being used in retail, the real question is how customers and associates feel about it. Does the Casey's customer like talking to an AI when ordering their breakfast pizza? As consultants, it's easy to get excited when cutting-edge technology makes it to the field. But the measure of any new technology isn't the implementation. It's whether the customer experience on the other side of it is better.

Retail Media Meets the World Cup | El retail media se encuentra con la Copa del Mundo

🇺🇸 The 2026 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted by Mexico, the United States, and Canada, is set to become the biggest retail media and omnichannel commerce laboratory in history. Brands and retailers are turning to treasure hunt strategies, gamifying their digital and physical advertising touchpoints into a series of clues and rewards, to transform soccer fans' passion and attention into purchases across online and in-store channels.

Our Perspective: The boundaries of what constitutes commerce and entertainment keep getting more and more blurry by the minute. Events like the FIFA World Cup 2026 are the perfect ground for retailers of all industries to try out new engagement ideas, explore innovative ways to reach customers, and establish partnerships to build long lasting brand names in the customer's mind. And this is just getting started.

🇲🇽 La Copa Mundial de la FIFA 2026, celebrada de forma tripartita en México, Estados Unidos y Canadá, se perfila como el mayor laboratorio de Retail Media y comercio omnicanal de la historia. Las marcas y minoristas están adoptando estrategias de "Treasure Hunt" para convertir sus puntos de contacto digitales y físicos en pistas y recompensas que transformen la emoción de los fanáticos del fútbol en ventas concretas.

Nuestra perspectiva: La línea que divide el comercio y el entretenimiento cada minuto se borra más y más. Eventos como la Copa Mundial de la FIFA 2026 son el terreno perfecto para que empresas detallistas de todas las industrias prueben nuevas ideas de participación, exploren caminos para conectar con sus clientes, y establezcan relaciones estratégicas para establecerse como marcas por excelencia en la mente del cliente. Y esto va apenas empezando.

Thanks for Reading!

That's June. The through line this month is that familiar retail problems are getting new solutions, and the retailers paying attention are moving faster than the ones still waiting to see how it plays out. We'll see you next month.

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