Ulta's Flock Surveillance Backlash, Costco Next's Silent Shutdown & Amazon's Agentic Alexa Push

Hello, everyone. This is OmniTalk Retail. I'm Chris Walton, and you are listening to the Retail Daily Minute, your quickest, fastest breakdown of all the day's top retail news. Today's podcast is brought to you once again with the help and support of R&S Logistics. Are you looking for a fulfillment and distribution partner? That's just right. Well, RNS Logistics is small enough to provide custom solutions and that personal touch, while also still boasting 2 million square feet across 10 locations in the Southeast. With technology that can scale your growing e-commerce operations, visit rswarehousingsolutions.com and get your quote today. And I'm also pleased to introduce Zenline AI because you have likely heard about AI agents a thousand times this year. They're also probably wondering what they can do for you as a retailer. Visit tryzenline.ai to book a call and see how agents can bring you more margin. I hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day weekend if you live here in the States. And if you're listening to this somewhere abroad, I hope you had a wonderful Monday. Because this morning, we're going to get right to it. Today, we've got news on Costco quietly killing off one of its online programs and Amazon's push to make Alexa your always-on shopping agent. But we begin today with Ulta Beauty finding itself in the crosshairs of a social media firestorm over its use of automated license plate readers from surveillance company Flock. According to Retail Dive, an activist campaign from the group Ultraviolet went viral this week, prompting a flood of angry comments across Ulta's Instagram posts. Now, to be fair to Ulta here, a source told Retail Dive the technology is only in use at less than 1% of its roughly 1,500 stores and that it doesn't include facial recognition. But here's what caught my eye, folks. Neither Ulta nor Flock would actually confirm on the record when this relationship began or answer much of anything directly. Fox's own AI chatbot, on the other hand, was happy to tell people that Ulta is one of its retail partners. That gap, which by gap I mean official silence paired with public confirmation elsewhere, is exactly the kind of thing that turns, or could turn, a modest sub-1% of stores rollout into a full-blown trust problem, similar to the situation Ben Miller covered at Sainsbury's recently on his GrocerTalk podcast. There it was about facial recognition, however, but this is still the same ballpark or the same neck of the woods. You choose the metaphor. Retailers undoubtedly have real organized retail crime and employee safety issues. Nelts' own team has talked openly at industry events about wanting technology that helps them work with law enforcement. But Flock has no doubt become a lightning rod, with vandalism incidents rising and some state and local governments now reconsidering their own contracts. If your vendor is the one taking the reputational heat nationally, staying quiet doesn't make the association disappear. It just means a story gets told without you.

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