Amazon Closes Grocery Partner Storefronts, ALDI’s $39 Thanksgiving & Target Upgrades Its Store Team App

[upbeat music] 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 today's top retail news. Today's podcast is brought to you once again with the help and support of Zenline AI, because you have likely heard about AI agents 1,000 times this year, but are also probably wondering what they can do for you as a retailer. So visit tryzenline.ai to book a call and see how agents can bring you more margin. Today is October 15th, 2026. And this morning we've got news on Aldi's under $39 Thanksgiving dinner, and Target's latest upgrade to the app its store teams use every day. But we begin today with Amazon pulling back from its grocery partner storefronts. Amazon confirmed to Grocery Dive that it is closing an unspecified number of retailer-specific grocery storefronts on amazon.com. Amazon's stated reason is one of simplicity. Separate storefronts meant shoppers had to navigate different fees, different delivery windows, and different checkout experiences for each grocer. And Amazon says it's responding to customer feedback. The company didn't say which partners are affected, and it confirmed a limited number of jobs are impacted as well. So what's left for these partners? Well, it appears that Amazon still plans to serve as the third-party e-commerce partner for many of them, and Amazon is also pitching what it calls other collaboration opportunities, like hosting Amazon lockers and return points in their stores, co-locating Amazon operations in their stores or warehouses, and running their e-commerce and data on AWS. Depending on the scope of the change in question however, if we are just talking about the loss of dedicated storefronts, this story is in and of itself a nothing burger, because those storefronts probably get very little traffic anyway, and are indeed likely confusing for shoppers. But if Amazon is also starting to wind down its marketplace partnerships with any of the US regional grocers, like Winn-Dixie and Weis Markets for example, then this could indeed be important and weaken Amazon's long-term grocery position in comparison to the likes of DoorDash and Instacart.

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[upbeat music] All right, we are back, and our next story signals that the Thanksgiving dinner price wars have officially begun. In a press release out this week, Aldi says shoppers can buy a full Thanksgiving dinner for 10 for under $39, with no coupons and no loyalty cards, no minimum purchases, and no memberships required. A shot to me which looks clearly directed at Walmart and Sam's Club. That basket includes a 16-pound turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, dinner rolls, cranberries, peas, carrots, celery, pumpkin pie fixings, milk, and even whipping cream, and works out to less than $4 a person. Aldi built the basket around the same