The K-shaped consumer, and why growth now lives at the store level
Neela Montgomery, Senior Advisor / Board Director, Alix Partners, Logitech, Ahold Delhaize · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.
The top 10 percent of American shoppers are now driving half the sales. That is the number Neela Montgomery keeps in front of her boards, and it reframes what growth even means. If you serve the strained consumer, she says, you are “having to trade every transaction.” If you serve the premium end, you are fine. The middle is where the pain lives.
Montgomery sits as a board director and senior advisor across Alix Partners, Logitech and Ahold Delhaize, with a past life running Crate and Barrel and CVS and cutting her teeth at Tesco. She has seen the machinery from the inside.
Her read on where the levers actually sit is the useful part. Not autonomy for store managers, but intelligence pushed out to them: central data ingested by AI, then handed to the furniture seller at Crate and Barrel as a personalised solution so they can do what they are good at, which is selling. On AI itself she is blunt · the experimentation phase is over. One 16-year company veteran, pointed at the customer software with unlimited access to a coding tool, found 280 points of failure and the machine fixed 60 on its own. That is the power: speed to clear historical tech debt.
Then there is GLP-1. Ten to twelve percent of Americans now on the drugs, smaller clothing sizes, less volume through grocery, and a scramble towards protein and fibre. A killer for some categories, a premiumisation story for others.
What matters for you is that every one of these shocks has a shape you can trade against, if you can see your customer at a granular enough level. Most retailers still cannot.
The Roth Read. If half your sales come from a tenth of your shoppers, you do not have a marketing budget problem, you have a targeting problem. Stop spending to acquire people without the spending power, and start pushing your best intelligence to the person on the shop floor. The winners this cycle will be the ones who trade every transaction on purpose.
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.