[00:00:11] Brian: Hello, and welcome back to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Brian.

[00:00:16] Phillip: I'm Philip. I am with a gravelly voice this morning.

[00:00:19] Brian: Oh, gravelly Philip. Well, today we are here to talk about the retail Super Bowl: BFCM. And we have an incredible guest on to chat about some of the data that they found during the period, Holly Worst, the VP of Retail at Adyen. Welcome, Holly.

[00:00:35] Holly Worst: Hello. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:38] Brian: It's exciting. Holly, give us a quick summary of Adyen, and I mean, most people already know, but you know, and your role there.

[00:00:47] Holly Worst: Yeah. So my role is I run our retail strategy. So, trying to talk to as many retailers as possible and see where they're headed as a company and make sure that Adyen's ready to meet them there. So staying on top of trends, what we're seeing, and making sure that our product is ready for retailers and consumers in the future. But at the heart of what we do, we're a financial technology company that helps customers around the world move money. So everything from taking payments, optimizing those with FX and interest, and then paying them out. But, we started as an end-to-end payments company. So that is at the core of what everyone knows Adyen as. Uh, and we work with retailers all around the world. We work with some of the big, kind of, tech players like the Metas and the Ubers and the Netflixes, but also the IKEAs, the Crate and Barrels, and the Pradas. But yeah, super fun. We're a global organization and do a lot of business in the US as well.

[00:01:44] Brian: Amazing. Yeah. And so moving money around means you have a pretty good view into what happened over this past shopping weekend. And people constantly are like, Oh, Black Friday is on its way out. It's expanded too much. It's overblown. It's Black October now. It's Black September. Right into August. And it doesn't mean anything anymore. I think the data might show something a little bit different. And as we saw kind of some of the early action, people are like, "woah, what's going on?" American economy is fine. That's the word on the street. The word on on Twitter.

[00:02:26] Phillip: The word on the street is that the... I think the fears of a lower or flat line Black Friday have been alleviated. It's who's shopping, I think, is going to be some of the questions that we're gonna have to be teasing out. Right? But, Holly, what what did Adyen see?

[00:02:44] Holly Worst: Exactly. Let me show all the fun facts. We've been having so much fun reading through them...

[00:02:49] Phillip: Let's go.

[00:02:50] Holly Worst: ...and saying, "what does this mean for the world?" But every year, we see Black Friday––or the holiday shopping––starting earlier and earlier. This year, we saw $43B in transactions globally with a peak of 199,000 transactions per minute. And so I always like to say there's about 8 billion people in the world. So that means everyone went out and spent $5 throughout the weekend, which is fun. We saw 837 million transactions in total, and 126 [million] of those were in-store, so that meant the rest was online. We are also able to identify shoppers on the platform. So, that is, we have a new product coming out where we're really using that data to kind of prove fraud and make our products better. So, for customers shopping in the United States, we saw 50 million unique shoppers. They shopped about 1.6 times per person, and we were able to recognize 97% of them. That means at some point in their lifetime––97% of the time, we knew who that person was and had seen them before. And then, on the flip side––so think about US shoppers abroad, so when you think about an issued card from America––we saw 90 million unique shoppers (instead of the 50 million), they shopped about 1.9 times per person, and we were able to recognize 98% of them. So, that's pretty cool, saying that there's 40 million, kind of, extra American citizens or, uh, residents out there shopping in the world. Or it's people like myself who still have my US credit card and use it to buy things because I love my points. But just really cool to see the amount of people that are out there shopping.

[00:04:40] Holly Worst: Some other fun facts that we saw: I think we often see that the US gets all the credit for Black Friday. So even when I was kind of researching, you know, what happened on Black Friday, it was "US, US, US." And, yes, Black Friday grew in America about 2.8 times higher than any typical Friday, but we also saw higher growth in other countries. So Denmark saw 6.1 times increase, Spain 4.5. So it's showing that there are other countries that are actually growing over Black Friday weekend, which I think is really cool. And maybe we can take this, uh, rhetoric of it being a US holiday and make it a global holiday in the future.

[00:05:24] Phillip: I'm already hearing that it is. Just as a total aside, this is some conjecture, Brian, but I'm really tapped into a bunch of other media brands and new media brands. And more than one of them are based in Europe. And many of them are talking about, like, "when is Black Friday this year?" "Oh, it's on the 28th." "What? When is that? Why is it? Why does it change every year?" "Oh, it's because it's based on America's, you know, Thanksgiving holiday, and it's like it moves around." And I just...I think that the awareness of the Black Friday––the Black Friday being co-located against a US holiday, and it being a global phenomenon––is such an interesting phenomenon. It is a global sales holiday that just happens to align to an actual US bank holiday, if you will. And the fact that there is a sort of like colloquial, like joke now, like, "we don't even know when it is, but it's happening. We're all going to take part in it."

[00:06:34] Holly Worst: Even Amazon's tacking Cyber Monday onto it, right? Like Amazon is in so many countries. So I think all of these things over time have really helped the globalization of brands, how easy it is to recognize a US brand even when you're abroad, shop online... Like, all of this is really helping with its popularity across the globe.

[00:06:54] Brian: For sure. I feel like this is a PR campaign for Thanksgiving. Like, okay.

[00:07:00] Holly Worst: It is the best holiday.

[00:07:01] Brian: Yeah. It's a bait and switch. It's like, a doorbuster for Thanksgiving. It's big.

[00:07:06] Phillip: Actually, honestly, I feel like the cranberry marketing has done its job really well over, like, fifteen, twenty years. It's like cranberry is not... Big Cranberry is behind everything.

[00:07:18] Holly Worst: I do Friendsgiving every year, and opening up the can of cranberry sauce for a lot of expats at inner––I live in Amsterdam––

[00:07:25] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:07:25] Holly Worst: ––as they're just like, "what is that? Is that beef?" And you're like, "just eat it. It's delicious. It's wonderful."

[00:07:30] Brian: It comes out of a bog. {Laughter}

[00:07:33] Phillip: We have to get both. We also have sort of a mixed Thanksgiving experience. We have South Africans here. And so there's like... We have to do lamb, and we have to have mint jelly, and mint sauce. And then we have to have cranberry jelly and cranberry sauce with our Turkey. Then we've got kids, and they don't eat either of those things. They have to have chicken. It's like, it's just a whole smorgasbord. But I think the smorgasbord also is the thing that happens with retail because people are shopping now online, they're shopping in-store. Some people like me get dragged on our sorry butts... I got dragged out to go to doorbusters. I feel like the Gen Z/Gen Alpha are having this sort of like animoia effect, of like "it's a nostalgia for a thing that we've not experienced yet." Like, go and stand in line for Black Friday. We were shopping really early. I got up at 4:30 a.m. to go shop in line. That's not necessarily when peak shopping is happening on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. What are you all seeing on your platform?

[00:08:31] Holly Worst: Not at all. So very consistently every year... in-store Black Friday – 1 p.m. Is the time.

[00:08:40] Phillip: In-store. Yeah.

[00:08:40] Holly Worst: So, you waking up at 4:30 or 5:00, that's crazy, because 1 p.m. is when everybody's going out. {Laughter} And then online, it was Black Friday at noon. So what does that say about us as consumers? I don't know. We like to shop after our breakfast or after lunch.

[00:08:56] Brian: Yeah. Like, 12 p.m. online shopping is basically the same thing as in-store at one because it takes you time to get out the door. Like, everybody's basically getting moving at about 12 p.m. the day after Thanksgiving.

[00:09:11] Phillip: That's pretty good.

[00:09:12] Holly Worst: They're eating their leftover turkey sandwich that they've made and eating it while also shopping online.

[00:09:18] Brian: Or pie. I just eat pie for breakfast the next day.

[00:09:20] Holly Worst: Your favorite. {Laughter}

[00:09:21] Phillip: You're telling on yourself now.

[00:09:23] Brian: Yeah. For sure.

[00:09:24] Phillip: So tell us a little bit more about some of these, uh, we're seeing these rising platform volumes. I will––you know. There's been a lot of discourse and, a lot of people are talking about things like BNPL, or whatever. But I think there's a longer-term trend that's starting earlier every year. There's a there's a negative and positive side to it. One is that there's sort of deal fatigue and that they're stuck. You know, we can't really seize on a moment to shop, although I think Black Friday/Cyber Monday is the moment. What do you see? Do we see the elongation of the season, the shopping season, putting a damper on the Black Friday, Cyber Monday shopping as as an event?

[00:10:09] Holly Worst: I mean, clearly the numbers are not lying, so we're not seeing that. But I think you can always see this as a positive and a negative. So on the positive side, you have this moment in time where people are reminded, "hey, it's time to start shopping." And so they get out there and they spend money. And then it usually lasts throughout the whole holiday season because Q4 is kind of the Super Bowl for all retailers, and that's where they see the majority of their sales. But on the negative, you're totally right that if this becomes longer and longer and longer, you might start to distress that this is a deal actually, and it's not transparent. Maybe people are faking that this is actually a deal that you got. So I think there's a fine balance, but clearly, people are still using this as a moment to get out and go shopping. And it could be. Especially in the US, we have the time off. Right? It's a perfect time to go out with your family and start looking for those deals.

[00:11:04] Phillip: Yeah, that's the distrust, I think, is the clear factor. I had four emails in my inbox in the last couple of days, per day. From specific brands.

[00:11:15] Brian: Just four?

[00:11:17] Phillip: No, I mean, from the same brand in a given day, four to five.

[00:11:23] Just four?

[00:11:23] {Laughter} But it was, you know, "last chance, we promise, last chance." And then the next morning, it was like, "we heard you! We're carrying it over." Is it ever really the last chance? Tell us a little bit about the sales growth or the transaction, value growth, what is that looking like year to year and how does that stack up to prior years?

[00:11:51] Holly Worst: Yeah. So we always usually see that people shop more in-store and spend more in-store than they do online, except on Cyber Monday, where then the ATV is actually higher. So Black Friday was the most spent in-store, the highest ATVs. It means people are going out and they're really shopping for each transaction, and that was 40% higher than what we saw online. And then on the flip side, on that Cyber Monday, the average transaction was a $103 online, which was 45% higher in-store. So these Cyber Mondays, Black Fridays are really working to get people to spend money. So, yeah, I think it's that moment in time that you have those deals and you're going out and you're hunting and it does work. So retailers should keep doing it each year.

[00:12:40] Brian: Yeah. It makes sense too because usually people don't have Monday off. So, hence, the Cyber Monday. It's like, "oh, how do we extend deals? Well, people can't go in-store, so we'll just do them all online," and it works. And it's funny, because now it's Cyber Week. I don't know how many of you out there have gone Cyber Week––which is, I mean, kind of nice because sometimes people... It's hard to shop on it all in a single day, and they're afraid they're gonna lose the deal, and then it extends, like, further into the week. But I think that the Black Friday online shopping has also been growing like crazy. What about Thanksgiving itself? That's been a growing holiday as well or, like, part of the whole extended period.

[00:13:30] Phillip: Brian, you're supposed to be present with your family on this.

[00:13:33] Brian: I know.

[00:13:34] Holly Worst: Well, actually, I feel like... I live in a country where they don't celebrate Thanksgiving, so I had to be at work. But I remember going back to the US sometimes and you actually had some brands coming out saying, "hey, we're taking this moment to give to our employees to be with their families" or even the grocery stores would close early. So is that not a continued trend in America or have we kind of stopped that? Um, because I remember seeing that a lot more often.

[00:14:00] Phillip: Yeah. There's this, uh, we had a––I think post COVID––the early store openings that would start on like 5, 7, 8 p.m., the early Black Friday openings or the sales that would kick off early. Those seem to have sort of waned. And I think in the 2021-2022 era, where there was a lot of economic concerns about, you know, can we bounce back from a COVID/post-COVID slump or keep the COVID e-commerce highs going. What we started to see is like, those deals that would drop on a Black Friday, we're going to start on Thanksgiving Day. Those were timed, I think, specifically for an e-commerce boom that was meant to sort of try to maximize the value of an economic fear. So, we did not see that this year. I don't think that that played out in any of the data...

[00:15:03] Brian: Kind of. I mean, the one thing I'll say is I got up on Thursday morning. This is anecdotal, obviously. Yeah.

[00:15:08] Phillip: For sure.

[00:15:09] Brian: Yeah. I got up on Thursday Friday morning, and I, like, went over to the Costco site because I'm a huge Costco guy as everyone that's listening to this podcast ever knows. And it was like, here was the messaging: "Black Friday continued." And I was like, yo. I'm just up. Like, how is this supposed to be Black Friday continued? I literally just woke up.

[00:15:34] Phillip: Yeah. The messaging is is fraught.

[00:15:37] Brian: Yeah. I think there's... there's still quite a bit of sales that go live online the day before, the day of Thanksgiving, and they say "Black Friday starts now." But I do think, to your point, Phillip, there was a moment when we saw Black Friday encroach in-store onto Thanksgiving...

[00:15:58] Phillip: That's what I mean.

[00:15:59] Brian: ...and, like, that has seems to have have kind of cut back or stopped, which is great. Thank heavens.

[00:16:10] Phillip: As we're looking towards, you know, these in-store payments, right? Point of sale volume, etcetera... This is something that I think you all track pretty closely. Tell us a little bit about these upcoming sort of like payment preferences and like trends around payment preferences, how people are paying. Do you see anything that's an indicator there?

[00:16:30] Holly Worst: In the US, there's this phenomenon. So across the world, many of us do not go out with our wallets anymore, and we use our phones to pay for everything. And contactless is ubiquitous. But in America, it's always been lagging. So this is the key thing that we love to track on Black Friday because you see the peak of US shopping and you're like, okay. Is it time? Are we at 100% year-over-year yet? And so, what's great is we did see an increase in contactless payments and wallet usage in the US, but it's still lower than the rest of the world. So when it comes to contactless, that means you're just tapping your card or using your phone to make a payment. We saw year-over-year growth in the US rise from 53% during Black Friday 2024 to 65% during Black Friday 2025. So that's an increase of 23% in-store, which is really good. So we're very excited. We're almost getting there. Um, and then when it comes to wallet usage, the US had the strongest growth, which is great. So the point of sale volume share paid with mobile wallets doubled. So we saw a 100% increase from 15% last year to 30% this year. Still super low compared to countries like The UK or The Netherlands, but it's a step in the right direction of how people are interacting with their cards and using Apple Pay and Google Pay and things like that. So it'll be interesting to see how this grows year-over-year in the future.

[00:18:02] Phillip: Wow. That's a big that's a big shift year-over-year.

[00:18:06] Brian: I've seen so many people go walletless, physical-walletless lately. One of my friends have just gone straight to a phone case with, like, a couple of key cards, and that's it.

[00:18:19] Phillip: I did that. I did that this year.

[00:18:20] Brian: A bunch of my other friends have done it. I haven't got there yet. I should probably get there. Yeah.

[00:18:26] Phillip: Rocking the Costanza.

[00:18:28] Holly Worst: Every time I see my family, I work in payments. Right? And they'll be like, oh, I forgot my card. I'm like, no. You didn't. Put it on your phone. {Laughter} No excuse. No excuse for forgetting your card anymore.

[00:18:40] Brian: If you're in New York, everybody just uses their phone because that's how you do the subway now. You're just like tap, then it's over.

[00:18:46] Phillip: It's true.

[00:18:47] Holly Worst: That was the catalyst for this becoming a huge payment method in Europe, especially, right? Because the train is much more prevalent. Like in cities like New York, you'll see contactless be a lot more prevalent just because you have this everyday habit that you do. And so as it expands across the US where there isn't public transport, right? So you'll slowly see it adopt across the rest of America.

[00:19:14] Phillip: Yeah. Wow. When we are looking at the you know, there's sort of a an abandoned cart phenomenon. We're always trying to recover lost opportunity. I think everybody's aiming for 100% recovery. I don't know if that's possible. But... a couple years ago, I was on a ru, Brian. And you'll remember I posted a pictur. There was a shopping cart out in the middle of the woods that I found, and I posted a picture of it like "I found it, I found the abandoned cart that everybody's been looking for." But, you know, when we're talking about the online abandoned carts aren't the only carts that get abandoned, right? There's retailers in-store that have, you know, checkout abandonment. Tell me a little bit about how you all are tracking, that at the payment level. Like, what does relevance of payment offering have to do with checkout and payment completion?

[00:20:12] Holly Worst: Yeah, we often so every year we do this big piece of research. We call it the Retail Index. And we track the abandonment if you don't have your preferred payment method available. And so we see that 46% of consumers in the US will actually leave a store or abandon that online checkout if they can't pay with their preferred payment method. And I often think of it like my Visa card, even in America, right, it's a US. Sometimes merchants don't allow foreign cards to be spent, because it's a little bit more money. But I know I get that protection that if that big delivery doesn't come––say I bought a couch––then who's gonna protect me? It's it's trapped in the ether. And so I will actually go try to find a couch at another retailer so I can make that spend. And so, that is what we're talking about. And so it's really important that merchants think of these things, and we can see all of this data on our platform. We know what cards I like to use and, um, will convert with and usually spend. And so we're able to give that data to our retailers across the globe so that they know which payment methods are best to use for their customers.

[00:21:20] Brian: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I think especially now as we're moving towards the digital wallets and digital wallet becomes more important to people as their preferred payment method, if you're unable to accept that, that's where you're going to start to see some more abandonment, I think. Because as people get used to using that, it's like, "Oh, I have to switch to something else." That's where I think the most important shift is right now is making sure that the digital wallet is available because there is this transfer to using that as your preferred payment methodology.

[00:22:02] Holly Worst: Or or you're not bringing your wallet. Right? So you may walk in with just your phone and then they're like, oh, sorry. We don't accept accept Apple Wallet. So then you're just like, oh, sorry. I I can't pay.

[00:22:13] Brian: I've actually watched this happen.

[00:22:15] Holly Worst: Yeah. Exactly.

[00:22:17] Phillip: We'll cover it in our predictions episode. So this is a plug for a future show in about three weeks time. So mark your calendars. But one of the big features on our predictions episode will be payment acceptance. I think we're going to be facing a potential with card acceptance rules and merchants being able to decline rewards cards in 2026. This is a potential issue for a lot of high rewards cards and, you know, certain merchants having to pay the fees for that because there's a lot of fees associated with these high-rewards cards. And if you're a Sapphire or a Platinum cardholder, someone foots the bill for those. It's often the merchant. Right. And so there's a lot of rule changes that are happening around things like that that are coming down the pike. It's something we'll talk about in our predictions episode. And that's something to kind of keep a track of, how, you know, not everything is as universal...may not be as universal as it is today. That's something to maybe kind of keep an eye on. Maybe Adyen, you have some data on that that we could probably tap into.

[00:23:29] Holly Worst: Yeah, for sure. I think you can make a relevant similar look at Amex acceptance, because they are more expensive than Visa, Mastercard. And so, you can kind of see. But a lot of merchants will still accept Amex because it's usually associated with a high-spending––

[00:23:49] Phillip: Correct.

[00:23:50] Holly Worst: Persona. So exactly with a Chase Sapphire, right? That's a little bit more open to people. So not accepting one of the most popular cards in the world is probably not a smart thing for a merchant to do. Uh, but yeah, it definitely has some implications and it's something to think about in the future, but you can make some good similarities there.

[00:24:10] Brian: Well, one thing we haven't even touched on yet, and I can't believe we've made it, you know, twenty five minutes of this podcast and haven't said the word AI. {Laughter/Groans} I think with AI, we're starting to get into a sort of a different paradigm with payment and checkout as well. And so what did you see on that front, Holly?

[00:24:36] Holly Worst: Yeah. So as of now, we haven't seen any huge influx of AI commerce on our platform, but we are actively taking all the steps to talk to all the OpenAI platforms. So I think most of our merchants are very intrigued and they're...what would I say..."fast followers." They want to make sure that it's set up right and that they have the controls and the securities. And so they rely on us to be that partner to help them. And so that's exactly what we're doing is we're making sure that we put the merchant first whenever AgenTek Commerce takes off and we're all spending all of our money on there. But right now it's really used as an interest and a discovery tool and not necessarily the purchase funnel. And so I think that's what we're seeing and it's buying us some time to really be that one-stop-shop for merchants so that they only have to integrate to Adyen and we're integrated into all the large language models and all the different platforms to make that purchase. Um, but, yeah, it'll be really interesting. I'm excited to see where it goes because it's not the first time we've had this major shift in shopping habits, right? So when we had the phone come out, is mobile going to take over desktop? Is ecom going to take over in-store? It hasn't yet. So I think it's just another really exciting thing to keep a pulse on and we'll build as the trend builds and our retailers will move whenever it becomes the peak of shopping.

[00:26:07] Brian: Anecdotally, did either of you use AI in your purchasing journeys holiday, over the shopping holiday?

[00:26:16] Holly Worst: I did not.

[00:26:18] Phillip: I did, Holly. Yeah.

[00:26:19] Holly Worst: Did y'all use it for discovery, or did you actually make a purchase? Because it only works with a few retailers at the moment. Right?

[00:26:26] Phillip: Yeah. Not for a purchase. For discovery.

[00:26:28] Brian: Came close. Came close actually, because the thing that I ended up buying ended up being from the thing it recommended. So, I actually did use the link from ChatGPT to the page that I ended up buying from that retailer. So it wasn't in context purchasing, but it was actually the ultimate sort of referrer to the thing that I ended up buying.

[00:26:52] Holly Worst: Yeah. Like the influencer purchase.

[00:26:55] Phillip: {Laughter} Exactly. You know, the issue is just days before Black Friday, ChatGPT dropped a new shopping agent. And so if you're using, you know, at least the web version of ChatGPT, they were like prompting you to use the shopping agent, like, "use this new shopping...tool to do all kinds of things...Price comparison or, you know, feature comparison. Like, we know all of your preferences. You know, we can help you look for things." And it gives you like prefilled prompts for all all kinds of things for, you know, gift and and wishlist creation, that sort of thing. I found it very interesting to use and I think it's interesting. Once again, we're early. I think we'd seen some data that, you know, there's some early data that AI usage did steer a, you know, some a push point, something like $14 billion of GMV in or $18 billion of GMV for Black Friday. But that's I think that's some early data.

[00:28:16] Holly Worst: That's a fun fact. Online refunds were up globally more in the US.

[00:28:22] Phillip: One of the challenges of, you know, the online shopping is, you know, the online returns, obviously. So if online shopping is up, online returns are probably going to be up too. Tell us a little bit about, you know, some of the ways that you all track, you know, that is is there data that Adyen has on how, you know, merchants and consumers are managing, you know, the returns?

[00:28:46] Holly Worst: Yep. We can actually track all the refund rates online. And so we do see, unfortunately, that it does go up during Black Friday. So the global average is actually that is up 36%, which is quite a lot. But in the US, it's not as high, so that's good. So it's only 19%. So that must mean Americans are a little bit more for sure with their purchases. But yeah, I don't see this as a bad thing. Right? Sales are up, returns are up, but it is one of those moments where we are pressured to really buy a lot of things and unpack it for Christmas, you know, as a present, and maybe people don't like it later on. I always remember I'm one of those people. I took back almost everything my poor mom ever bought for me because I didn't like it or it wasn't the right size. Um, so unfortunately, these things happen, so I don't see it really as a bad thing.

[00:29:40] Brian: Poor Santa.

[00:29:41] Holly Worst: Yeah. Poor Santa mom.

[00:29:46] Phillip: I wasn't so picky, but...

[00:29:49] Brian: Yeah.

[00:29:49] Holly Worst: You're a better child than me. {Laughter}

[00:29:52] Brian: I think there's, like, a lot of purchasing that happens for yourself on Black Friday, so it's not just gifts. And I have to imagine that a lot of, like, bracketing happens or someone buys something and then finds it for a better deal and buys it again and returns it to the other retailer. I can I can definitely see that happening? So when you're in a frenzied state of, like, consuming deals at the speed of light and they're just, like, permeating your body and your mind, then you like, you're like, you're just like, "oh, man. I gotta buy. I gotta buy." And then when you see something come along that is a better deal, you're not gonna leave that. You're not gonna let that go.

[00:30:35] Holly Worst: And people have very generous return policies nowadays. Right? We've gone beyond the you have thirty days to maybe you have two months, three months. So you do have that time to find that better deal when maybe in the past we didn't really have that.

[00:30:51] Brian: Especially over that holiday, almost all retailers and brands that I saw extend their return rates to after the end of your holidays. So I think that people feel very safe making purchases during that period. The big question is, and I would posit that the lower return rate in the US has to do with the fact that people are really bad at returning things that they buy online in the US. I'm guilty of this.

[00:31:26] Phillip: Every single time that I myself admit this, someone calls me out on it. So I'm just gonna keep my mouth shut in this portion of the podcast.

[00:31:35] Brian: Call you out on being like, oh, I...

[00:31:38] Phillip: I kept something that I bought that I intended to return. Yes, then.

[00:31:42] Brian: Oh my gosh.

[00:31:43] Holly Worst: You can if y'all love thrift shopping, you always always always can find things with the tags still on it. So brand new items. So...It is a really secret secret way to buy things.

[00:31:55] Phillip: There's a friend of mine who is a basically a professional thrifter, um, who will flip things like on Poshmark or what have you. I'm like, that seems like a lot of work. I don't know.

[00:32:07] Holly Worst: You could make some good money if you're good at it.

[00:32:10] Phillip: You can. You can. Then but I do think that there's a just, you know, having thought about the yeah, just in our in our current economy, there's a lot of folks who are also talking about like bang for your buck. Right? And so, you know, there's people who want to feel like they're in control. And I saw this, this, this thing. I screenshot it, it'll be in the newsletter. Tomorrow, Brian, but it was, it was, hey retailers, we've got enough cheap TVs now put the groceries on sale for Black Friday. And

[00:32:54] Brian: Oh, that's what I did. I bought groceries on Black Friday. Nobody's kidding you. That's exactly what I did. Yeah.

[00:33:00] Phillip: But I do think that we're in this era of self-control, like people want to have agency, right? They want to feel like they have autonomy, and they want to have agency. And so I think that's where you see that everywhere in our society is like self-checkout. You see it in it's all these little ways that it's sort of evidence in that I am in control. I'm in the driver's seat. What do you have any sort of perspective on things like, you know, the growth of self-checkout or the propensity of self-checkout that's driving any sort of growth of customer volume at stores or does it help? Does it hinder?

[00:33:42] Holly Worst: Yeah. I don't know about volume at the store, but I agree with you that there is definitely an increase in self-checkout. And we've gone from just seeing it in a grocery store where it totally made sense, right, high volume traffic. But people thought they were scared like, oh, everyone's going to steal everything. And we've gotten past that. And now you're seeing self-checkout in other categories. So I don't know if you've been to a Uniqlo or a Decathlon or a Zara or an H and M. They all have a self-checkout now. And so you're starting to see that self-checkout is solving maybe some pain points that a retailer had where they struggled to get staff in-store or staff costs are too high. So now you have a self-checkout that you're able to get customers through the line really quickly. You're also seeing it in stadiums. So here in Europe, specifically at the football or soccer matches, you have self-checkout for the beer line so that you don't you get through faster, get more beer, or just can get the thousands and thousands of customers coming at the exact same time to buy beer during halftime, get them through the line faster. And so you're starting to see it creep up. And once you see it in those, you're gonna see it in more and more and more categories. So I think we're on the precipice of something really unique and fun because none of us really like to talk to people and we can do things ourselves.

[00:35:03] Brian: Self-checkout for beer. That sounds dangerous. Holly, as we look ahead to next year, as we kinda wrap up today's chat, what do you see maybe early signals on this year that you kind of expect we'll see continued trends on in 2026?

[00:35:24] Holly Worst: Well, I guarantee we'll still see more shopping. I think as people grow and, you know, we get more customers, you're always gonna see that. I hope by this time next year, we're at the US, we're at like 70% using contactless because it's so ubiquitous across the world that I'm excited to see that. We're also gonna see a lot more mobile and tap to pay as we call it. So tap to pay is where you can turn your iPhone or your Android device into a payment device. So overall on the Adyen platform, we used to see the traditional countertop terminal. So it'd be fixed and you had to plug it in and that meant you had to have this fixed checkout line experience. Well, now we're seeing a lot more growth in terminals that can move around the store. And so I think even within that retail experience, you're just going to see very unique ways to check out in the future, maybe checking out when you try on your shoes, checking out in, uh, the tryout, uh, fitting rooms, checking out outside when you pick up your Christmas tree from the parking lot. There's gonna be a lot more fun ways. And so I think we'll see a little bit more of that going forward.

[00:36:32] Phillip: Yeah. I mean, those are great predictions.

[00:36:35] Brian: Yeah. Very good.

[00:36:37] Holly Worst: Remind me to check this next year and see if I was around...

[00:36:40] Brian: We'll come back. We'll come back. We'll chat about it.

[00:36:44] Phillip: Certainly not the last time we'll have you around these parts, Holly.

[00:36:47] Holly Worst: Super fun. Thanks, y'all.

[00:36:49] Brian: Yeah. Thanks for coming on.

[00:36:51] Phillip: We appreciate it. Thank you so much for checking out this episode of Future Commerce. You can find more episodes of this podcast at futurecommerce.com, where you find more data about all of the Black Friday, Cyber Monday happenings with our partners like Adyen, And we're publishing that on our newsletter and in perpetuity over at futurecommercecomm get all that you need at futurecommercecomm/ subscribe so that we're in your inbox three times a week. And you can get beautiful pieces of print when you join our plus program. As an executive member like this book, this is called Lore, and it's our newest book from Future Commerce Press. And you can get this it's our annual piece of print and get 15% off when you join Future Commerce Plus. It's futurecommerce.com/plus. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of FutureCommerce.

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