The Ben Mulroney Show - Amazon might be moving in for the kill, for all small businesses

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Amazon might be moving in for the kill, for all small businesses with Guest: Tony Chapman, Host of the award winning podcast Chatter that Matters, Founder of Chatter AI If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Very happy to welcome Tony Chapman, the host of the award winning podcast Chatter That Matters, as well as the founder of Chatter AI into studio. Always love being able to look my guest in the eyes. It's great being here. Such great energy in your studio. All right. Let's talk about this. The stories that we're going to be breaking down today are all dealing with some of the biggest brands in the world. And let's start with probably the biggest of them all Amazon. They're going to spend $4 billion to expand into small town delivery. So I've never, I don't live in a small town. I didn't know the limitations of Amazon in small towns. What are they, what problem are they trying to solve?

Well they're trying to put the world within arm's reach of desire. They did that with their app in terms of putting it on your phone, making it a vending machine. But the last mile is everything. How fast can they get that product here? So what they're doing is taking on Walmart said, we'll build a big Walmart and people will leave their small town in Main Street and drive to Walmart. Now they're basically saying, you don't have to do that. We'll just deliver it to your door

and we'll do it the same kind of speed in big cities. What I really wonder is why antitrust hasn't looked at Amazon. They now control half of online shopping in the United States. And more importantly, online shopping's growing double digit. So if you do the math, they're going to continue to grow with that growth. They're going to ultimately be in the point

where we're going to be doing business just with Amazon or they're sort of what I call trap lines, like diapers.com and baby.com and all the other zappos that they have out there. Yeah, and they've just, they've launched a lower cost version of Amazon to, I guess, compete with the T-MUs of the world, called hall dot com. Yeah, I completely agree. At some point, that's going to, that's going to hurt.

But this could hollow out sort of the mom and pop shops on those small main streets. Well, again, it was a small town. You got to say how important is my circular economy? How important is the people that work in the jobs they employ? How much do I value the energy on my main streets? Because you're going to have to vote with your consciousness, because convenience is what Amazon wants you to vote with. So if you're willing to get out of your lazy boy and go up to Main Street, I think you're

going to do well for the town. But again, Amazon, choice. They have it. Price, convenience. Three big tiebreakers in retail. All right. From Amazon, we move to another juggernaut, McDonald's, and apparently they've suffered the worst US sales decline since 2020 in their warning of an anti-American sentiment abroad.

I always thought they were bigger than that. That, you know, yes, they are an American brand, and yes, they are Americana, but to me, they don't wave the stars and stripes the way other brands might. But they're known as that. They're an iconic American brand, and I think you're gonna see that every time that Trump chirps and is bigger than a chirp,

tries to bully, command, demand, you're gonna see a backlash, and the way individuals can do is vote with their wallet. So I think a lot of American companies Trump chirps and is bigger than a chirp, tries to bully, command, demand. You're going to see a backlash and the way individuals can do is vote with their wallets. So I think a lot of American companies, including Apple, are looking around saying, we're attached to Trump where we used to benefit being attached to America. And I think that's the issue. Look at the movie. The terrorists on the movie industry, the rest of the world will basically say, well,

we'll put a tariff on American content. And they own 90% of the content around the world. It's one of the stupidest tariffs I've ever heard of. Cause he wants to bring movies back to America. That's, I'm thinking this doesn't make any sense. I don't think he's thought this one through. Oh, well. Yes, that implies he thought the other one through.

Fair enough. I knew it was wrong as soon as I said it. No, I think you're right. But some of it has to do with the cost of food as well, right? McDonald's used to be the low cost place where you could feed your family for $30. And now, $30 barely feeds one person.

Well, McDonald's for a decade survived on the dollar meal into $2 meal. They can't do that anymore because there's inflation. It's not just the cost of food. It's the cost of labor, transportation, everything that goes into it, cost of real estate, taxes in the local city. So McDonald's is now caught becoming an expensive, affordable gut-fill brand. All right. And then from McDonald's, we moved to Target. And Target, so we saw a push for self-checkout, and it's almost everywhere. That's ubiquitous,

right? But now they're dialing it back because they've noticed, what, they've noticed that there's more loss. Shoplifting. Shoplifting. And the issue is, and we've got to be very open to this, the fact of the affordability crisis, not only are you getting ready of self-checkout, in a lot of major cities, they're closing stores.

They're saying, I can't afford to have an open store because the shoplifting is more than the profit I'm making. So it's places like San Francisco downtown, there's no stores. So I think the issue we're dealing with is including that technology, which was let's get rid of the labor, we can make more money. Now realizing if we don't have labor, people are just going to steal us blind. Well, because I remember at one point there was a push and I saw it on social media that there was one target where they used to keep like the razor blades behind plastic and you had to get someone told to use a special key to open it up.

But in this one store, everything was behind gates. And who the heck wants a retail experience like that? You know, if you go to a store for that tactile thing, you hold the product, you read the instructions, you read the ingredients, you decide whether you want one versus another. And if that was the direction of retailers, you might as well close up shop because the one place I can't touch things, but it's a lot easier, is Amazon. Exactly. We go back to the Amazon story.

All rivers point to Amazon because I totally agree. CVS, in there, everything was locked but the coffee and I saw somebody walk out with a bag of coffee. Security guards didn't even chase them. Same thing at LCBO. Have you been in LCBO? People are walking out with free booze because they're not allowed to approach these people. We don't start fixing retail. We will not have retail. I actually was in an LCBO just a few days ago and there was a security guard there and I don't know why but I asked him, I said, hey, have you seen those videos online of people just like stealing

the booze? He goes, oh yeah. I said, has that happened here? He said, well, today's my first day. I was like, cause I guess the security guards are told not to do anything. And he's a young guy. So he goes, I would do something. I saw literally as LCBL person take out a book. Okay. What did he take this time? Oh, he had a scotch in this and they wrote it in the book. Yeah. And I went, so do I have to pay? Can I just walk out? And we heardululemon, I guess it was six or eight months ago, Lululemon said explicitly in their employee handbook that you are under no circumstances to stop a shoplifter. If they're gonna leave, you're gonna let them leave.

If you get in their way, that's cause for I think dismissal. Yeah, there's no, and because of the liabilities with it. So again, retail, if they don't solve this, there will be no more retail because you can't afford to offer you that experience of touching and feeling the brand. All right. Last, last story. Mark Carney's first week on the job after being elected

prime minister, elected to form government. Early days. Yeah, early days. But I like it. Yeah. So yeah, let's talk about the communication strategy. Let's let's talk about what went right. I like it. His acceptance of speech. I liked his first press conference, although he took a few days to have it. I love the fact that he's going and getting King Charles and people go, why? Because it's saying to Trump, I have contacts too. I have power.

Yeah. I like the fact that he's going to see Trump. And more importantly, he reached out to the West. His predecessor would never have done that. If predecessors would have said, it's, I'm the one, the world revolves around me. And he's saying, if I don't win over the West, I'm going to have the biggest crisis. I'm going to be the prime minister to seize Canada have the biggest crisis. I'm gonna be the prime minister that sees Canada separate.

Well, here's what's benefiting Mark Carney, on top of having to win in his sales from being elected. He's being compared to a guy who did a lot of stuff wrong. And one of the things that made me wanna pull my hair out was he, at least in the last five years, I never saw Justin Trudeau answer a direct question. Any question that was posed to him, he would pivot to a talking point.

And in that press conference that we saw on Friday, he answered every question. Now, you might not like the answer, but he gave you something. There was substance there, and that was so refreshing. So again, Barr pretty low, but he definitely cleared it. Yeah, Barr low, but he cleared it early days. The second he starts moving that brand and politics back to where it was, where the NDP used to occupy, my love for him will disappear. But if he focuses on the center, then I think we at least we

are much better option than we had in the past. Also, I thought it was quite magnanimous of him. And also because he's the guy who won that he said, I'm going to trigger a byous of him. And also, because he's the guy who won, that he said, I'm going to trigger a by-election so that Pierre Poliev can come into the House of Commons as quickly as possible. He said, I'm not playing games with this. I think that's him saying, I want him to know

I'm the prime minister and I can do this. And I'm doing this for him. So it's definitely a power play. But here's what I would do on that. I'd say I'm not going to run anybody against him. But yeah, well, that's been traditional. But think about what that does. It that. I'd say I'm not gonna run anybody against him. Yeah, well that's that's been traditional But but think about what that does it says I don't care about it. Yeah Hey, Tony Chapman. Thank you so much for being here. I'm glad you came in the studio. We'll see you every Monday

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