Retail Daily Minute | Starbucks Uplifts Chicago Stores, Ahold Delhaize Expands Pay-by-Bank & Edibles.com Enters Physical Retail

Hello everyone, I'm Chris Wilden and you are listening to the Retail Daily Minute, your quickest, fastest breakdown of all today's top retail news. Today is Monday, April 13th, 2026. I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend because this edition is brought to you 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 very podcast, so why not let Duvo do that work instead? To learn more, visit Duvo.ai. That's D-U-V-O.ai. Today we've got news on Ahol de Lez's push to go beyond the card swipe in edibles.com making its brick and mortar debut. But we begin today with Starbucks pulling back the curtain on what Back to Starbucks actually looks like inside a store. Starbucks has unveiled one of its first, quote, uplifted Chicago locations under its Back to Starbucks restructuring plan. And the era of the grab-and-go transaction machine may soon be coming to an end. The revamped standalone store in the old Irving Park neighborhood features leather couches, cushy chairs, throw rugs, drapes, and coffee-themed art on the walls. A deliberate return to what made Starbucks iconic in the first place, i.e. the third place. For years, Starbucks optimized its store experience around speed and throughput at the expense of the very atmosphere that originally differentiated it from every other coffee shop chain. The brand paid a steep price for that trade-off in customer satisfaction, traffic, and ultimately in financial results over time. The Back to Starbucks strategy under CEO Brian Nicol is a direct acknowledgement that the pendulum swung too far and that Starbucks believes that it simply cannot cost-cut and convenience its way out of a brand equity problem. What will be worth watching is whether this redesigned concept can be deployed at meaningful scale across Starbucks' 17,000 U.S. locations. Warm, cozy interiors are expensive and operationally complex to maintain, and the real test will be whether customers actually do stay longer and spend more rather than simply appreciating the new aesthetic on their way to the mobile pickup counter. The Chicago pilot gives Starbucks a data point. Turning one uplifted store into a system-wide turnaround is an entirely different challenge, however. 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. All right, we are back and our next headline has to do with Ahol de Lez, USA, expanding its pay-by-bank pilot in partnership with payments processor FISERV, making the option broadly available across the e-commerce sites and mobile apps of the giant company, giant food, and stop and shop. Tens of thousands of customers have already enrolled through the pilot, proving genuine customer appetite for bypassing the card networks entirely. And that is precisely the point. Every time a shopper pays by card, the retailer eats interchange and network fees. Pay-by-bank eliminates the friction and puts more of the transaction value back in the grocer's pocket. While Martin Kroger have been quietly building toward this same capability and Ahol de Lez is making clear it intends to be part of that frontrunner group. As pay-by-bank scales, it has the potential to reshape the entire grocery payments landscape, weakening the grip of Visa and Mastercard on everyday consumer transactions while giving grocers richer, more direct relationship with shoppers financial data. And finally, we close today with edibles.com, the hemp-driven THC platform from Edible Brands making its brick and mortar debut in Atlanta's Inman Park neighborhood. Doing so with a concierge-style service model featuring trained staff, a curated assortment of national and local brands and a deliberate emphasis on consumer education. For Edible Brands, the company behind Edible Arrangements and ROTE, Modern Mediterranean, this move signals a serious intention to build hemp retail as a legitimate structured category rather than as a gray market novelty. CEO Somia, Farid Silbers framing around transparency, education and consumer protection is smart positioning given the regulatory uncertainty that still hangs over hemp-derived products. The concierge model is a direct acknowledgement that this category requires hand-holding. Customers want guidance before they spend and face-to-face consultation is the most effective way to convert curiosity into confidence. Whether edibles.com can successfully scale this model beyond Atlanta will depend heavily on how the regulatory environment evolves and whether the company can build the kind of brand trust that makes consumers choose a dedicated hemp retailer over a dispensary or a general wellness store. The Atlanta flagship is a smart first step but the real test is of course what comes next.