Retail Daily Minute | PepsiCo's Pricing Blunder, Ace Hardware Teams With Uber Eats & Old Navy Sport Is Reportedly in the Works

Hello, good morning everyone. I'm Chris Wallin and you are listening to the Retail Daily Minute, your quickest, fastest breakout of all the days and top retail news. Today is April 8th, 2026. This edition is brought to you once again with the help and support of DuVo. Someone on your operations team is likely copying and pasting data between systems right now. Who knows, you might even be doing it while you're listening to this podcast. So why not let DuVo do that work instead? To learn more, visit DuVo.ai. That's DuVo.ai. Today we've got news on Ace Hardware's major last mile expansion through a new partnership with Uber Eats and Old Navy's reported plan to launch a brand new athleisure sub-brand called Old Navy Sport. But we begin today with a story that is equal parts business school case study and also cautionary tale. And that is one of how Frito Lay's stubborn resistance to cutting chip prices ended up costing PepsiCo billions of dollars and one that helps it to explain why the company is now in a race against time and global macroeconomic headwinds to win consumers back. According to a deep Bloomberg investigation, Frito Lay missed its internal revenue targets by over a billion dollars in each of the last two years and the culprit was hiding in plain sight. A bag of Doritos that had ballooned nearly 50% in price since 2021, crossing the $7 threshold that finally broke consumers willingness to pay, including my own. And I am the biggest Doritos fan that there is. Walmart had been warning PepsiCo for over a year. Shelf space was being stripped and handed to private label alternatives and competitors like Taki's. Yet senior leadership resisted cutting prices, reluctant to own the short term revenue hit that a rollback would inevitably produce. Instead they tried promotions, shrink flation, multi-pack gimmicks and a pivot to high protein snacks. None of it worked. What makes this story so significant is how perfectly it illustrates the danger of conflating pricing power with brand loyalty. Frito Lay controls nearly 60% of the US salty snack market, which is a near monopoly position that had grown revenues for 53 consecutive quarters. That kind of dominance can breed, if not careful, a particular organizational arrogance, a belief that consumers will absorb any price because there is simply no better alternative. But consumers proved otherwise in this case, quietly trading down to store brands and buying less. And soon the damage was done. Revenue turned negative for the first time in over a decade and the market cap dropped down more than $50 billion from its peak in 2023. PepsiCo's price cuts of up to 15% are just now rolling out and early tests showed a meaningful volume response. But those tests also happened before the war in Iran sent oil prices soaring, before consumers wondered fresh macroeconomic duress, and before a 397 bag of Cheetos had to compete not just against a rival snack brand, but against a household that has simply decided to spend less overall. The price cut may indeed be necessary but whether it is sufficient is a question that won't be answered until this summer and that uncertainty is exactly what just might happen when you wait too long to listen to your customers. Now before we get to our next headline, let's take a quick break to hear about another one of our sponsors, Miracle. Miracle is the catalyst of commerce. Over 450 retailers are opening new revenue streams with marketplaces, dropship and retail media and succeeding. With Miracle, unlock more products, more partners and more profits without the heavy lifting. What's holding you back? Visit Miracle.com that's M-I-R-A-K-L.com to learn more. Alright, we are back and our next headline has to do with Ace Hardware going big on last mile delivery, announcing today that it is bringing more than 3700 of its locations across all 50 states onto the UberEats platform. This is a notable move for several reasons. Number one, it is a direct acknowledgement by Ace Hardware that the on-demand delivery expectation consumers have built up around food is now fully migrating into home improvement. The fact that Home Depot joined UberEats back in January and Ace is following just a few months later tells you everything you need to know about how quickly this channel is being legitimized as a must-have for hardware retail. Number two, second and perhaps most importantly, this partnership is a genuine competitive differentiator for Ace given its unique franchise network structure. Ace's locally owned stores are deeply embedded in their communities and plugging them into UberEats infrastructure gives each of those independent operators a last mile fulfillment capability that would be prohibitively expensive to build on their own. The strategic question worth watching is whether UberEats becomes a meaningful enough revenue driver for home improvement to justify the economics long term, particularly given the basket dynamics of hardware purchases versus a grocery or restaurant order. For example, a bag of mulch in a box of screws is a very different delivery proposition than a burrito. But with UberEats aggressively expanding its retail footprint, adding more than 50,000 US retail locations in 2025 alone, the platform is clearly betting that convenience shoppers do not distinguish much between categories once habit is established. If that bet is right, Ace just bought itself a meaningful advantage in the last mile race among hardware retailers. And finally, we close the day with a forward looking story out of Women's Wear Daily, one that says that Old Navy is reportedly developing a new standalone athleisure sub-brand called Old Navy Sport with a potential free standing store format in the works as well. And it is an idea that I for one absolutely love. While speculative and Gap Inc. declined to comment to WWD, the strategic logic here in my opinion is sound and worth unpacking with you all. Well, Navy is already the fifth largest athleisure retailer in the country by volume, which is a staggering fact that I for one never fully appreciated until this very second. The brand has been building real product credibility in the category through launches like Studio Smooth and Powersoft Sculpt, fabrics that they claim compete with premium leggings at a fraction of the price. Old Navy Sport would essentially take that latent category strength and give it its own identity and retail presence, separating it from the core Old Navy shopping experience and positioning it more directly against Lulemon, Aloe and Viori, but at accessible price points. The wrinkle here is of course the Gap Inc already owns Athlela, which operates in the premium active wear space and has been a turnaround priority for the company. Old Navy entering this space more aggressively raises some questions about internal cannibalization and how Gap Inc. manages two distinct active wear brands under the same corporate umbrella. But with Old Navy posting 3% comp sales growth in 2025 and active being one of its fastest growing categories, you can understand why leadership wants to give it more room to run. And that cannibalization fears, well Old Navy has been down this road before and it is better to be about something than to try to reinvest in a brand, Athlela, that for my money is kind of stuck in the middle of no man's land. That's all for today, thanks for tuning in. Once again, this has been On Me Talk Retail, I am Chris Wong and as always be careful out there.