Kroger Cuts Its Sales Outlook, Amazon Makes Prime Video Shoppable & Planalytics Flags an Early Fall Chill

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. This morning, we've got news on Amazon's expanding push to make Prime Video shoppable and a seasonal demand shift that could reshape retailer shelves for this coming fall. But we begin today with Kroger and the same store sales outlook that just got a lot less rosy. Kroger trimmed its full year identical store sales guidance, excluding fuel to a range of 0.2 to 0.8 percent, down sharply from the 1 to 2 percent growth the company had guided to previously. Part of that cut, according to Kroger, comes from a negative 140 basis point hit tied to the Inflation Reduction Act's impact on pharmacy pricing. CEO Greg Foran also pointed to a cyclospora outbreak in leaf lettuce from Mexico that dinged the total company's identical sales by roughly 35 basis points late in the quarter, on top of consumers pulling back under the weight of higher gas prices. With all that said, including the grocery version of blaming the weather, i.e. parasitic outbreaks, Kroger's profit guidance didn't move at all. Earnings per share are still expected to land between $5.10 and $5.30, which tells you the company is leaning hard on cost savings and efficiency. to paper over what is in plain terms sluggish top line growth. Now, to be fair, there were bright spots, and I used the air quote intonation purposely there. E-commerce sales were up 20%, retail media revenue climbed 24%, its best quarter since 2021, and premium private label brand private selection also posted 14% growth. But when your headline sales number is being propped up by cost-cutting rather than genuine demand, that's a pattern worth watching heading into the holidays and a pattern I sadly predicted reading the tea leaves on Kroger last quarter.

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All right, we are back. And our next story comes from Amazon, which is pushing further into making prime video in actual storefront. The company is expanding its shop the show tool first introduced last year to more than 8000 titles up from just