About Dear Corporate... Love Stores | Engaging Retail Employees
The podcast retail executives need to hear but rarely do.
Hosted by CATO Creative's retail consultant Bekki Cait, and veteran store leader Matt Copeland, each episode brings you the unfiltered truth about what's really happening in your stores. Through candid conversations, they bridge the growing disconnect between corporate offices and frontlines—revealing why your best initiatives fail, what your teams actually need, and how to transform frustration into results.
This is your unvarnished window into the realities that engagement surveys and sanitized store visits never show you.
What is an employee actually thinking about when they give an engagement survey question a 2, a 3, or a 5?
That’s what we wanted to unpack in this episode of Dear Corporate… Love Stores.
Bekki takes Matt through a handful of very common employee engagement survey questions and asks him to go beyond the score: What experiences are you recalling? How are you interpreting the question? Who do you think it’s really asking about? And what are you expecting corporate to do with your answer?
Very quickly, it becomes clear how much can be hiding inside a single number.
“I have the tools and resources I need to do my job well” could mean training to one employee, decision-making authority to another, enough payroll to someone else, or having the inventory needed to actually deliver results.
“I believe I can have a career here” might really contain two different questions: Could I have a career here? and Do I actually want one?
And sometimes employees aren’t just answering based on their current experience. They’re thinking one move ahead: If I score this low, what are they going to do about it?
In this episode, we unpack:
What employees may actually be thinking about when they answer common engagement survey questions
Why broad questions can mean completely different things at different levels of the organization
The difference between having more “tools” and actually removing friction
Why career opportunity and desire to stay are not the same thing
How trust, anonymity and perceptions of who will see the results can affect responses
Why employees may adjust their answers based on what they think corporate will do next
How corporate teams can unintentionally interpret survey results through the lens of solutions they already wanted to pursue
Why looking at individual scores in isolation can lead you in the wrong direction
And why qualitative follow-up is critical if you actually want to understand what the data is telling you
If you want to act on the data well, get clearer about what you’re asking, look for patterns across multiple questions, and then go back to employees and ask what was actually running through their heads when they answered.
Because before you build another program, toolkit, training module or communication campaign, it’s worth making sure you understand what the score actually meant.
24 Sept 2026
Stop Waiting for Retail to Change Before You Change Your Life With Sam Foster
Retail has problems. Staffing, workload, culture, expectations — organizations absolutely have a responsibility to make things better.
But what happens when you spend years waiting for the job to change before you let yourself have a life?
In this episode, Bekki and Matt are joined by Samantha Foster, founder of Aligned Systems Co. and a retail leader with 25 years of frontline experience, to talk about the part of the retail experience employees may actually have more power over than they think.
Sam shares how she stopped waiting for better circumstances and started changing the things she could control — from her finances and health to the boundaries she set around work.
Together, they unpack the invisible badge of honour around overwork in retail, why leaders often follow expectations nobody actually gave them, and how self-imposed hustle can turn into exhaustion and resentment.
They also explore a bigger question: what might change in retail if more store leaders stopped making impossible expectations possible?
In this episode:
Why retail leaders can’t wait for someone else to give them permission to have a life
The difference between organizational problems and the pressure we put on ourselves
How retail’s “grind” culture gets passed from leader to leader
Why boundaries can feel dangerous even when nobody is actually stopping you from setting them
How overworking can create resentment toward the business
Why taking care of yourself can make you a better leader for your team
The connection between boundaries, autonomy and sustainable retail careers
Why organizations should measure how employees actually feel — not just the wellbeing programs they offer
What could happen if enough store leaders collectively stopped absorbing unrealistic expectations
About Sam Foster
Samantha Foster is the founder of Aligned Systems Co., where she helps retail leaders build the personal systems, boundaries and skills that allow them to succeed at work without losing the rest of their lives in the process.
Connect with Sam on LinkedIn or learn more at alignedsystems.co.
Connect
Sam Foster: LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-foster-mba?utm_source=chatgpt.com) | alignedsystems.co
Bekki Cait: LinkedIn (https://ca.linkedin.com/in/bekkicait?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
10 Sept 2026
Our First Ever Episode: Has Anything Changed?
More than a year ago, we started this podcast with one big question: why is the disconnect between corporate and store teams so hard to fix?
So this week, we’re going back to the beginning.
In our very first episode, Matt and I unpacked the day-to-day realities behind the corporate–store divide: initiatives landing in stores as though there’s unlimited time to absorb them, too many competing priorities and communication channels, metrics that can work against the mission, rigid standards that undermine good judgment, and the lack of trust that keeps corporate leaders from seeing what’s actually happening in stores.
Listening back now is interesting because so much of what we’ve explored over the past year was already sitting inside this conversation.
The engagement survey. Corporate visits. Store manager overload. Communication. Empowerment. Psychological safety. The pressure to make stores look fine instead of making it safe to say when they aren’t.
We’ve spent a year pulling those threads apart, challenging some of our own thinking, and getting much more specific about what it actually takes to close the gap.
But the central idea still holds:
Corporate and stores usually want the same thing — successful stores and happy customers. The systems between them are what keep getting in the way.
Whether you’ve been listening since the beginning or found us somewhere along the way, this felt like a good moment to revisit where the conversation started — and hear it again with everything we know now.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
YouTube views
17,423
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
8 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
7 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 45 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
48
Social presence
0
YouTube
72
Engagement
32
Contact Dear Corporate... Love Stores | Engaging Retail Employees
Guest appearances
Does not typically book guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
Host of Dear Corporate... Love Stores | Engaging Retail Employees?
Claim your podcast to manage its listing and keep your show details accurate.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show Podcast research with Pod Engine
