Three Years In, We Finally Ranked the Stores We Actually Shop

Three years of the Watson Weekly, and Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky mark it by doing the one thing a retail show almost never does on air: putting a grade next to the stores they actually shop.

It is a tier list. S through C, live, no rubric shown to the audience. Alo Yoga takes the only S, on a hundred-plus stores, international expansion into London and Korea, and a King Street address in Charleston sitting between Skims and Gucci. Rick admits he was a hater first. Amazon lands at A on the strength of everything that isn't retail, including an ad business Jessica sizes at $56 billion, and lands there in spite of an experience Rick says has been crapped on by its own advertising. Lululemon and Nordstrom both stop at B. Eight varieties of pants that nobody working the floor can explain, and a service standard Nordstrom wrote for itself that Rick clocked hitting about fifty percent across four recent visits.

Target does not get a letter. It gets a sell. Two years without a CMO, stores still out of stock, a rough back to school, and an insular Minnesota culture that Rick argues rejects outside ideas faster than it can hire them. Walmart gets a buy.

Plus: Whole Foods as a returns counter that occasionally sells milk, why the Rack keeps outrunning the mothership, what Dick's is really buying with Foot Locker, and Jessica's ongoing Nuuly problem.