A 40-square-metre fish cake stall tells you how to enter China now

22 October 2026

A Korean fish cake brand has just opened a shop the size of a studio flat in the basement of a Shanghai department store, and the way it got there is worth a look. Samjin Foods has entered China in a sequence most Western brands still get backwards.

Samjin Foods, the Busan-based company behind the Samjin Fish Cake brand, opened its first eastern China store on 16 October on the second basement level of the New World Dawan department store on Nanjing East Road, in Shanghai’s Huangpu district. The Korea Times reports the outlet runs as a hot deli, cooking to order, a format the company does not use in its own Korean stores. On some days during the soft opening, the company says, sales reached as much as 200 percent of target. According to the Seoul Economic Daily, the crowd shifted over the National Day holiday from mostly tourists to nearby residents and office workers.

While the shop builds the brand, the distribution is already running underneath it. Samjin’s Sun-sal Bar fish cake bars are sold through about 1,300 Lawson convenience stores in Shanghai and surrounding areas, the company says. Bulk packs went into two Shanghai Costco stores at the end of September, and the product is on display in Hema, Alibaba’s Freshippo. The company also told the Korea Times it is in talks with Pang Dong Lai, the Henan retailer Chinese shoppers admire almost cultishly, about getting on its shelves.

Most Western brands plant a glossy flagship, pour money into the opening, and then spend two years wondering why the single store cannot carry the brand alone. Samjin turned that around and treats the shop as a laboratory. It cooks product in front of a Chinese shopper and watches which flavours move: the cheese croquette and the rosé-sauce rice cakes, two dishes invented for a palate that is not Korean. It then feeds that reading straight into what the convenience stores and warehouse clubs should stock. One rented basement unit gives Samjin a test kitchen and a demand signal for 1,300 fridges at once.

China rewards the brand that is small enough to iterate and connected enough to scale the moment the data says go. Samjin is doing both in the same quarter, refining the recipe in Huangpu while the bars already sit in Lawson, Costco and Hema.

The partners are also telling. Samjin did not assemble a bespoke China joint venture over eighteen months of legal fees. It used the ready-made rails of the market: a convenience chain, a warehouse club, a fresh-grocery platform, and a bid for the shelf of the one retailer every Chinese shopper trusts.

What to watch is the Pang Dong Lai conversation. A listing there would work as a credibility stamp more than a distribution win, because Chinese shoppers treat its shelves as a curated verdict on quality, and the store does not simply sell slots. If a mid-sized Korean fish cake brand lands on those shelves on the strength of a few months of Shanghai sales data, the curated gatekeeper is now a faster route in than the glossy flagship ever was.

The Roth Read. If you are planning a China entry, stop asking how big the opening should be and ask how fast it can teach you. Build the smallest shop that can cook, watch and report, wire it to distribution rails that already exist, and let the shelf do the scaling. The brands that win here learn fastest, and they act on what they learn before the quarter is out.

The comforting story about automation is the one that lets us stop thinking.

21 October 2026

The most seductive idea in robotics this week is a sentence rather than a machine: the robots are leaving, and automation will hand us back our humanity. It is written warmly, argued confidently, and beside the point.

It comes from a Forbes author post by a technology founder at the natural-language firm Arria, who says he does not buy the AI doomsday hype. His case is the old reassurance in new clothing. History shows automation changes the nature of work rather than the rate of unemployment, earlier waves freed our bodies from physical labour, and now language technology will free our minds from the robotic mental grind.

The argument is appealing, and it asks you to take a lot on trust.

Other voices this fortnight are far less soothing, and they are better sourced. Research published by Anthropic on 30 September, reported by India Today, found that large language models and robots could potentially perform tasks accounting for around 81 percent of working time in the US economy. The same research adds the caveat the reassurance crowd skips: current robots remain expensive and limited in the physical world, with nursing and general repair less exposed than driving and warehouse work. Being able to do a task does not mean replacing the worker. Even so, 81 percent of working time is not a rounding error you can wave away with a word like humanity.

This matters to anyone who runs a business rather than writes about one. The claim that automation only changes the nature of work is true in the long aggregate and brutal in the particular. The truck driver displaced in year one gets no comfort from a prompt engineer being hired in year five. The economist James Pethokoukis, in his AEI essay on robot trucks, points out that the panic over self-driving vehicles displacing drivers is now more than a decade old, and the fleet of unmanned lorries has not arrived on schedule. So the timing is slow, the dislocation is real, and the people reassuring you tend to be the ones selling the software.

The founder arguing that automation returns us to our humanity sells automation. The vision of work made optional, of abundance for all, is offered most loudly by the people who own the machines, and none of them discloses the gap between the promise and the interest. Nobody in these pieces explains who captures the value that 80 percent of working time represents, or how it reaches the person whose job it displaced. That question about distribution is the whole argument, and the brochure leaves it out.

Zoho’s founder Sridhar Vembu, quoted in the same India Today piece, at least names it. He calls universal basic income an “unimaginative and dystopian vision,” and argues instead for livelihoods in nature, nurture, culture and scripture: restoring soil, raising children, caring for the old, making music. You need not agree to respect the move. He is asking what humans are for when production gets cheap, while the leaving story assumes the answer sorts itself out.

What to watch. For retail and brands, the practical read is to plan around neither the comforting timeline nor the frightening one. Plan around the Anthropic distinction: tasks fall faster than occupations. The jobs your customers trust a human to do, the ones with touch, judgement and care, are the last to go and the first to command a premium. The brand that automates the drudgery and visibly keeps the humanity will win the shopper. The brand that automates the humanity and keeps the drudgery will lose her.

The Roth Read. When someone tells you the robots are leaving and your humanity is coming back, ask who gets the money the robots made on the way out. If the person reassuring you also sells the software, you are reading a sales deck. Check who funds the next wave of “automation sets us free” essays, and read the disclosure line before the headline. Automate the drudgery, guard the human touch your customers pay for, and never let a pretty sentence do your planning for you.

History of Retail in 101 Objects – Object 9: Coin

19 October 2026
Coin · The History of Retail in 101 Objects

700 BC

In China, from around 1200 BC, the cowrie shell was used as an item of exchange – ‘shell money’. Archaeologists’ finds suggest that from 1000 BC the Chinese began to produce mock cowrie shells made of metal.

However, evidence indicates that metal coins also appeared independently of each other and these Chinese versions, at two other locations on the Eurasian continent – Lydia (now Turkey) and India between 700-600 BC. It is thought that increased trade between these locations was a trigger for the creation of coins to replace the barter system.

Bartering had two distinct disadvantages – the person wishing to ‘buy’ may not have anything the ‘seller’ wished to acquire, and even if they could agree on a trade, the haggling process was time consuming. Coins offered a solution in that they represented fixed values and could be exchanged not for their intrinsic value, but in order to change hands again in payment for some other goods.

An appreciation of the value of metals such as gold and silver had already developed. Since these metals were durable, portable and demand for them remained constant, they were a natural choice for use as a common currency. The value of a coin depended upon its weight and metal content.

The idea of using coins quickly spread to Greece, and because the early Greeks were keen traders throughout the Mediterranean, coinage spread around the region. Alexander the Great minted vast quantities of silver coins, using them to pay his armies and keep them loyal. It is believed that this significantly contributed to his ability to expand across three continents.

Contribution to Retail History

Whether Greek, Roman or Islamic, gold or silver, hammered or milled, coins represented an inherent value that fostered trade among local tribes as well as nations. Throughout ancient and modern civilizations, coins not only represented a certain trusted value, but also a message of culture and symbolism as various images, rulers and leaders were engraved on them.

See where this object sits in the sweep of retail history →

About the series. The History of Retail in 101 Objects is compiled and edited by David Roth, CEO of The Store WPP and Chairman of WPP BAV. It tells the story of retail through the objects that shaped it, from the cave to the connected store, organised across the historical periods in which each innovation made its mark. As David puts it, the history of retail is the history of mankind, and of retail’s vast contribution to society. A new object appears here every Monday.

This is the fourth edition, the World Retail Hall of Fame edition. The book, and every object published so far →

In Conversation: Jon Stine, Honeycomb Retail AI

16 October 2026

The Tsunami Is Coming, and You Cannot Tell the Water to Go Away

Jon Stine, Fellow, Honeycomb Retail AI · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Not a wave. Not a tidal wave. A tsunami that changes everything, and the first waters are already reaching the shore.

Jon Stine has spent a career at the meeting point of retail and technology, working with and for Intel and many of the world’s top technology companies, and he now sits as a Fellow at Honeycomb Retail AI. He came to Berlin to watch the water come in.

Two things he said are worth carrying home. The first is about where the value actually lands. The glamour is on the front end, the content, the agentic search, the brand showing up inside a large language model. But the money, Stine argues, is round the back: “the vast majority of the value will come from the use of agents to transform, recreate, re-architect business processes.” His method is unfashionably disciplined. Do not throw AI at a pain point and hope. Start with an operational metric. Replenishment that took two days from recognition to order, can you take it to sixteen hours, or eight, or four? Find the marginal basis points, then let them compound.

The second is speed, and here he is blunt. The differentiator will be the ability to know sooner, decide smarter and act faster than your competition. Not because speed is a virtue in itself, but because the shopper already knows sooner. The AI natives are in primary consumption spaces now, and their expectations only rise.

For a brand owner, the warning is precise. Your brand strength is what a large language model reaches for, but your operations are what let you keep the promise it makes.

The Roth Read. Stop asking what AI can do and start asking which decision you make too slowly. Name the metric, cut the hours, let the basis points compound. The shopper already knows sooner than you do.

David Roth In Conversation is a series of conversations with the leaders shaping the future of retail, recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026 in association with the World Retail Congress. A new conversation is published every Friday.

BYD drew a robot. The drawing you should study is the dealership floor.

15 October 2026

BYD filed a design patent this week, and the drawing matters less than where BYD says the robot will go.

On 9 October, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration published an “Embodied AI Robot” design patent with BYD as the holder, according to CarNewsChina and Star News Korea. The drawings show a black-and-white humanoid with a rounded, screenless head and jointed torso, arms and legs, designed to walk, balance and interact with people. It looks very like “Xiao Di”, a robot a BYD executive teased on social media earlier this year. Figures disclosed earlier put Xiao Di at 1.61 metres and 58.5 kilos, with 31 degrees of freedom and a hand accurate to plus or minus one millimetre. BYD has not confirmed that the patent shows the production model.

Most carmakers now have a humanoid in a slide deck. BYD has also said where its one will work. According to CarNewsChina, its executives plan to deploy these robots across the company’s own dealership network, to greet customers, explain the cars and demonstrate the in-car infotainment. They are meant for the showroom, not the factory.

That makes this a retail story. For twenty years the dealership has been the weak link for premium car brands. Service varies from one site to the next, and a carefully built brand can be undersold by whoever happens to be on the floor that Saturday. BYD wants to automate the one role no carmaker has ever controlled: a salesperson who never has an off day, never improvises the pitch, never forgets the script, and demonstrates the infotainment the same way in Shenzhen as in Stuttgart. The robot is the headline. The bigger change is brand control reaching the last metre of the sale, the one part the brand has never owned.

China matters here because of how BYD builds. It is the world’s largest integrated maker of electric vehicles, and it is making this robot the way it makes everything else: in-house, at scale and from its own parts. It set up a dedicated robotics team in 2022, invested in AgiBot in 2023 and took a stake in Percibot in 2025. It has also been running Ubtech’s Walker S1 inside its own Changsha plant to collect operating data. BYD already makes the batteries, motors and actuators and runs the factory floor, so the robot is simply the next product down the same line. A Western carmaker partners with a robotics firm and negotiates over the margin. BYD owns both sides of that deal, and Western boards keep underestimating what that is worth.

There is reason for caution. A design patent is a drawing. There is no price, no reliability data and no deployment date, and Xiao Di may never get beyond the teaser video. A hand accurate to a millimetre still has to survive a showroom full of children and spilled coffee. So far BYD has shown renders and no revenue, and scepticism is fair.

The intent is still clear. BYD wants to know whether a humanoid can be the brand’s own face in the room where the sale happens. That is a far more commercial question than whether one can work in a warehouse, and almost no Western retailer or carmaker is seriously asking it yet.

What to watch. See whether BYD puts one of these robots on a dealership floor before it puts one in a factory. The order of deployment will show what BYD thinks the robot is for. If customers meet it first, BYD is selling brand control rather than cost savings, and that is the version retail executives should worry about.

The Roth Read. Picture the robot on your own shop floor, in your uniform, saying your words every time, without fail. BYD has said its humanoid belongs where the customer decides, in the showroom. If your brand still treats the last metre of the sale as somebody else’s problem, BYD is about to show you what that assumption costs.

Agatha Christie, by Lucy Clayton

15 October 2026
Agatha Christie, drawn for Brand Stories from Brand Champions

Lucy Clayton on Agatha Christie. One of 121 stories from Brand Stories from Brand Champions, which I devised and curated for The Store, WPP.

I love Agatha Christie.

Not because she is the bestselling novelist of all time (only Shakespeare & The Bible beat her for readership and I confess I am rather less familiar with those works) but because her stories are told and retold today with as much enthusiasm as when she first wrote them. The constant adaptations give a freshness to the tales but it is their familiarity that gives them longevity; the comfort of repetition. I've loved them since childhood, spending many hours replaying audiobooks on tape until the sound started to hiss with stretching. And nothing soothes a hangover like an early 90s ITV Poirot you've seen a hundred times before. I'm not sure I've ever seen the end of a Poirot, I tend to fall asleep somewhere in the middle so to be honest I never really know whodunnit. I love that her work is constantly being repackaged , from beautiful reissued books to lavish Hollywood movies. The same stories dusted off and given a new lease of life. As period pieces, they allow us to enjoy the eternal appeal of art deco; everything is so refined and gilded and precise, even while there's claret splattered all over the walls. I've always thought Miss Marple is a fashion icon. No one does knitwear like her. Geraldine McEwan's wardrobe is my favorite, she had the most flair – lots of lace collars and layering.

We think of authors as brands quite naturally these days, we know modern writers must do the rounds of the literary festivals and public speaking, we expect perfect Instagramming to accompany each new publication. But Agatha Christie was better than that, bashing out novels while starring in her own (unsolved) mystery in her personal life. Her shocking eleven-day disappearance made the front page of the New York Times and Conan Doyle took one of her gloves to a medium to try and solve the thing. We don't know if it was a stunt but if it was it was genius.

It was after visiting Mrs Christie in 1934, at Exeter St David's station bookstall, that Allen Lane came up with the idea for good books at a price everyone could afford, going on to democratize literary fiction and start a paperback revolution with Penguin Books. Perhaps her legacy is far greater than simply the gentle art of murder.

Lucy Clayton
Lucy is CEO of Community Clothing, a social enterprise with a mission to sustain and create jobs in the UK textile and garment manufacturing industry, where many of the workforce are at risk from the closure of factories. Together with Founder, British Fashion Designer Patrick Grant, Lucy has focused on delivering the company’s social impact, collaborating with organisations working with the long-term unemployed. So far the brand has created over 11,000 hours of skilled working hours in UK factories. Lucy’s career began at a fashion startup in New York and has taken her on a diverse journey from the pages of The Lady Magazine to the Playboy Mansion. Before Community Clothing, Lucy was a Board Director at J. Walter Thompson, running the Graduate Recruitment and Training programme and working with Rimmel London, Warehouse, Glamour Magazine Coty Fragrances, HSBC, Pfizer & Unilever. Passionate about discovering and mentoring talent, Lucy regularly gives talks in schools and colleges. She is part of the charity “Speakers 4 Schools” a committed network of leading figures who want to give back to young people in state schools. She regularly speaks on industry trends at events including WGSN, AdWeek Europe, The Crowd, Fashion Revolution Open Studio Week etc. She is number 22 in the Financial Times and HERoes inaugural list of top 50 Women Role Models in Business, 2017.

There are 120 more. Brand Stories from Brand Champions collects 121 people writing about the one brand that shaped them. Amazon UK · Amazon US. The full index is at www.davidroth.com/brand-stories/stories/.

History of Retail in 101 Objects – Object 8: Paper Money

12 October 2026
Paper Money · The History of Retail in 101 Objects

1000 BC

Paper currency, which was first developed by the Chinese during the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century, marked the beginning of simplifying the payment process and making it easier, less cumbersome, and far more dependable. Produced primarily from cotton, paper money also contributed to the expansion of trade among regions and territories. With 180 recognized currencies worldwide today, paper money has recently given way to electronic transactions and the future will be greatly influenced by various digital crypto currencies.

In the 13th century, when Genghis Khan conquered China, he quickly grasped the potential of its paper money and began using it as a currency throughout his empire. He seized people's existing supplies of gold and silver and gave them paper currency in exchange, leaving the population no option but to trade with paper money.

Although the use of paper money spread and continued for several hundred years, it was not wholeheartedly embraced. In Persia, its introduction in 1294 led to a complete collapse of trade. In the 15th century in China, the issuing of paper notes was mismanaged, leading to rapid depreciation of their value and causing inflation. As a consequence, the use of paper money in China ceased in 1455 and did not resume for many years.

Europe came far behind Asia and the Arab world in its adoption of paper money, primarily because Europe didn't have paper until around 1100 AD. The alleged first instance of the use of paper money in Europe was in Spain in 1438 during a Moorish invasion (a Spanish military leader paid his soldiers with paper).

Early on in the introduction of paper money, European governments took over its production and began printing 'official' paper money. These paper receipts were all given fixed values and people began leaving their heavy coins with merchants in exchange for them. The earliest known English goldsmith certificates were being used by 1633 as proof of ability to pay.

Nations and colonies developed their own paper money, leading to the variety of notes in use today. In 1816, governments established the 'gold standard', to ward against inflation. This tied the value of paper money to a specific amount of gold, held in the government treasuries. The US officially adopted the gold standard in 1900.

Today, not all notes are widely accepted and the average lifespan for a currency's circulation is only 39 years. The longest running paper currencies are the British pound, (introduced in 1694) and the US dollar (introduced in 1792).

Contribution to Retail History

The earliest paper money was used in China around 1000 BC and it was most commonly used as a letter of credit, transferred over large distances.

See where this object sits in the sweep of retail history →

About the series. The History of Retail in 101 Objects is compiled and edited by David Roth, CEO of The Store WPP and Chairman of WPP BAV. It tells the story of retail through the objects that shaped it, from the cave to the connected store, organised across the historical periods in which each innovation made its mark. As David puts it, the history of retail is the history of mankind, and of retail’s vast contribution to society. A new object appears here every Monday.

This is the fourth edition, the World Retail Hall of Fame edition. The book, and every object published so far →

In Conversation: Parag Parekh, Ingka Group | IKEA

9 October 2026

The Shopper No Longer Wants a Bed. They Want Better Sleep.

Parag Parekh, Chief Digital Officer, Ingka Group | IKEA · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Customers have stopped asking for a bed. They are asking for better sleep. They have stopped asking for a sofa. They are asking someone to help set up the living room. That shift, small in words, enormous in consequence, is the one Parag Parekh kept returning to.

Parekh is Chief Digital Officer of Ingka Group, the largest IKEA franchisee, steering a digital operation he describes as six or seven years young inside an 80 year old business. Late to digital, and he says so plainly.

What he does not do is pretend the playground is infinite. When product teams had autonomy and agility but no clear business owner and no idea whether a project sat in the top ten or top thirty priorities, IKEA built a retail investment council to rank and stack every request against top line or cost. Discipline, not enthusiasm. He is candid about what is not cracked: warehouse software still running on Pascal from the 1980s, creative production still largely outsourced, HR and finance foundations unbuilt. The wins are specific. A customer service chatbot, Billy, absorbs repetitive intents so co-workers can be moved to room design sessions that were rationed by cost per room. Free the hours, democratise the service.

Here is what a brand owner should take. Parekh anchors every digital decision to what IKEA means: trust, comfort, a data promise made before a single digital product shipped. The technologist guards the brand, not the marketing department alone.

The Roth Read. If agentic commerce means shoppers describe a room and not a product, then your catalogue is no longer the asset · the solution is. Ask yourself whether an agent, given a messy hallway, would surface your brand or route straight past it. The retailers who win this dance are the ones whose trust transfers into the machine, and IKEA started building that promise before it built the ecosystem.

David Roth In Conversation is a series of conversations with the leaders shaping the future of retail, recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026 in association with the World Retail Congress. A new conversation is published every Friday.

History of Retail in 101 Objects – Object 7: Cowrie Shell

5 October 2026
Cowrie Shell · The History of Retail in 101 Objects

1200 BC

In the earliest civilizations the concept of ‘trading’ was well established, but there was no equivalent to money for use in such transactions.

To get your food you would ‘barter’ an item such as fish, fur, clothes, decorative items, tools or even weapons. From 9000 to 6000 BC the nearest equivalent to currency was cattle.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the first widespread form of currency was introduced around 1200 BC, through the adoption of the cowrie shell as a trading ‘token’. These shells shared many of the attributes of modern coins – being durable, portable, easily recognizable and hard to fake. As well as being counted out in payment, they could also be traded by weight.

The cowrie shell was indigenous to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but its use as a trading token spread and it became the most commonly used means of payment across large parts of Asia, Africa, and some of the outer reaches of Europe. The significance of shell trading in China is evidenced by ancient artefacts that show simplified representations of the cowrie used as part of the characters for words with economic meaning – such as money, coin and buy.

Just as with currency exchanges today, the value of the cowrie shell could fluctuate, depending on where it was being traded. For example, in some places a few cowries would buy a cow; whereas in the Maldives (where cowrie shell collecting and trading was a big business), several hundred thousands of cowries would be required in exchange for a single gold dinar.

The Portuguese, English, French and Dutch played a significant role in promoting the cowrie as a currency for commercial transactions, including using it for trading in slaves. In Western Africa, ‘shell money’ remained legal tender right up until the mid 19th century.

Contribution to Retail History

As the first recognized ‘common currency’, the cowrie shell played a vital contribution to the development of commerce and early formal retail. Non-perishable, lightweight and robust, it opened up international trade opportunities by enabling transactions to be carried out across continents and between different cultures.

See where this object sits in the sweep of retail history →

About the series. The History of Retail in 101 Objects is compiled and edited by David Roth, CEO of The Store WPP and Chairman of WPP BAV. It tells the story of retail through the objects that shaped it, from the cave to the connected store, organised across the historical periods in which each innovation made its mark. As David puts it, the history of retail is the history of mankind, and of retail’s vast contribution to society. A new object appears here every Monday.

This is the fourth edition, the World Retail Hall of Fame edition. The book, and every object published so far →

In Conversation: Nail Valley, Youzu

2 October 2026

Most Retailers Are Bolting AI On. The Real Work Sits in the Catalogue

Nail Valley, Co-founder, Youzu · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Ask most e-commerce leaders about AI and they will point you to a shopping assistant plugged in through an API. Nail Valley thinks that is the easy trick, and the wrong place to start. The real work sits underneath, in the catalogue nobody has bothered to understand.

Nail is co-founder of Youzu, which he describes as an “intelligence layer for e-commerces and marketplaces.” His argument is that most sites talk about adoption while doing the shallow version: “just, you know, kind of using API solutions that’s connecting to LLMs, which is quite simplistic.”

His case has two floors. The foundation is product data, catalogues and SKUs, enriched and normalised by embedding both text and visual data so the machine actually understands what is on the shelf. On top of that sits visual AI: computer vision models that let a shopper search by image, a Google Lens experience most retailers have seen at the big platforms and almost none can offer themselves. “99% of e-commerce do not have that.” He is candid, too, about what is coming: AI-generated content so realistic that within a year or two you will struggle to tell it from a photograph, with humans left to moderate rather than make.

Here is my read. The seductive part of AI is the shopper-facing layer, the chat window, the clever demo. The unglamorous part is knowing your own images and video well enough that a machine can too. One is a feature. The other is a foundation. Skip the foundation and the feature sits on sand.

The Roth Read. Before you buy another shopping assistant, ask a harder question: does your business actually understand its own catalogue, image by image? If the answer is no, you are decorating a house with no floor. Nail’s five-year warning is blunt, and you should take it as a deadline, not a mood.

David Roth In Conversation is a series of conversations with the leaders shaping the future of retail, recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026 in association with the World Retail Congress. A new conversation is published every Friday.