Kevin Coupe – Getting A Grip On Grocery: The Local, The Global, & The Cutthroat
Drawing from over four decades of industry experience, Coupe offered a lively, humor-infused look at the past, present, and future of the U.S. food retail market.
Coupe opened with sharp wit, reflecting on how radically the grocery world had transformed since he started reporting on it in 1984 when Walmart did not sell groceries, A&P operated nearly 1,000 stores, and e-commerce was entirely nonexistent. He quipped about the absurdities of modern consumer perceptions, noting how shoppers wildly overestimated supermarket profit margins at around 35%, when actual margins hovered at a modest 3.5%. Drawing laughter from the room, Coupe joked that if grocery stores were pulling in 35% margins, he would have quit journalism years ago to open his own supermarket.
Throughout his talk, Coupe balanced humor with keen industry observations about the dominant retail giants of the time. He contrasted Walmart—which sat within 10 miles of 90% of U.S. households and was aggressively testing drone delivery—with Amazon’s relentless focus on rapid fresh delivery and automated subscriptions. Local corridors like the Boston Post Road served as prime examples of where regional favorites like Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Wegmans, Costco, and Stu Leonard’s actively competed for consumer loyalty.
Beyond price perception, Coupe highlighted several pressing Main Street challenges, including maintaining trust amidst food safety scares like cyclosporiasis outbreaks and navigating consumer anxiety surrounding dynamic electronic shelf tags. He also pointed to the growing influence of GLP-1 weight-loss medications, noting that while 11% of the U.S. population was using them, few food retailers had adapted their inventory to cater to those changing appetite patterns.
To thrive in an environment dominated by mega-retailers, Coupe urged local businesses to abandon complacency and adopt five core strategies: actively competing every day rather than relying on past reputation, eliminating non-essential practices, offering distinct experiential spaces and proprietary products, prioritizing long-term customer relationships over individual transactions, and using authentic storytelling to build customer trust.
“Content Guy” / Prime Storyteller, MorningNewsBeat.com, Author, “Retail Rules! 52 Ways To Achieve Retail Success,” & Co-Author, “The Big Picture: Essential Business Lessons From The Movies”
For more than 40 years, Kevin Coupe has been bringing to audiences all over the world a wealth of experience, sharp storytelling skills, provocative and contextual insights, unique worldview and “serious irreverence” about the world of business and consumers. He is the author of “Retail Rules! 52 Ways To Achieve Retail Success,” a guidebook for competing effectively and efficiently on Main Street, and co-author, with Michael Sansolo, of “The Big Picture: Essential Business Lessons from the Movies,” which uses film narratives to teach about leadership, marketing and surviving the workplace. A quarter century ago, he launched MorningNewsBeat.com, providing “business news in context, and analysis with attitude” to more than 25,000 subscribers all over the world, finding critical, relevant and resonant lessons not just in the world of retailing, but also in sports, popular culture and a wide range of other businesses. An independent survey recently ranked MNB as the “top industry news and information site.” And, Kevin is an adjunct faculty member at Portland State University in Oregon. In addition to speaking at hundreds of conferences in the U.S. and abroad and reporting from 49 states and six continents, Kevin has been a daily newspaper reporter, magazine writer/editor, video producer, bodyguard, and clothing salesman. He has supervised a winery tasting room (happily), run two marathons (slowly), driven a race car (badly), learned to box (painfully), tried stand-up comedy (amusingly), and acted in a major (but obscure) motion picture. He is married with three grown children and lives in Connecticut.
