Blue Margins Rising, Charger Collab, Empty Foot Lockers

Paul Daly: 0:27Yo, good morning It is Tuesday. Today we're talking about four glues margins rising, as well as a brand new charger collaboration and footlocker sales. Well aren't smells so good

‍Kyle Mountsier: 0:44

Yeah, little sound effects for the morning intro for Yeah, yeah. Didn't have the triggers match, but you don't need

Paul Daly: 0:49

the trigger pads. We got the Kyle pads. Beautiful Sunday Tuesday in Syracuse, the mornings that I love so much, where I know it's gonna get like almost the ad today. But it's like 55 and sunny and crisp in the morning. I got to put on a little sweatshirt.

Kyle Mountsier: 1:06

Yes, beautiful thing. That's exactly what it's basically like five degrees warmer in Nashville, which is pretty wild to me. Sometimes I think about that. And my count of Syracuse get this warm, but you know, it does so, so loud for a little bit. We're having a spring, we're having a little bit of spring. That's

Paul Daly: 1:20

good. That's good. Humidity, like this time of year. All of it. That's the difference. When you're like 70 degrees when it's you. It's yeah,

Kyle Mountsier: 1:32

it's now it's like yes, it's probably like my kids are like, end of the year field days, and my son comes home like, like you run a marathon. Bro, we

Paul Daly: 1:44

gotta do better with that classroom smells like

Kyle Mountsier: 1:49

for teachers.

Paul Daly: 1:52

Well, hey, we are super excited. We are coming in hot to tomorrow's live stream premiere release of more than cars. It's the network style show that we filmed the pilot episode. And we also are doing a crowdfunding to get the rest of the season made everyone not everyone. But so many people in automotive are constantly telling us somebody needs to make something, we need to let the rest of the world know what's going on. In automotive, there's so many great people and so many great stories, we don't deserve the stigma in the way that we have it. So we said we're gonna make a show, we're making a show. And we need to get the industry to band together to help us finish making the rest of it. So we're going to be launching this crowd fund that has all kinds of cool stuff. I mean, get your name in the credits and swag bombs. And if you know like if you're an industry partners opportunities for you to get up in front of everybody and we even have a few for some from choice dealers, bringing bring the episode to your store. So so much stuff coming up. Let's go first and foremost,

Kyle Mountsier: 2:53

I gotta not wait, I see a share. Yeah, we gotta you gotta make the last stream, you got to see it. First, you gotta know what we're doing what's happening. And like the way that other people have responded, I think that that, like, if you come if you see it, you'll most likely respond in a similar way. It's just, it everyone makes you laugh. It'll make you clap to yourself. You know, it's, it's just, that's the field, it's the field. And so that's

Paul Daly: 3:19

tomorrow at 1pm. Eastern, you can go to more than cars.tv more than cars.tv. Get right to the LinkedIn live events. So you can be part of that big release party and you can watch it live there. Or you could also watch it on YouTube. Regardless, we need the industry to show up on the stream tomorrow to celebrate the thing that we all have built together, right? We're not celebrating the show. We're celebrating what we do every day, every dealer, every fixed ops person, every salesperson, every industry partner, all of us. Every detailer, we got we got some everybody we're celebrating

Kyle Mountsier: 3:53

some great show on that Tuesday. Tell you preach.

Paul Daly: 3:57

Let's go look. I love it, man. Well, we say dealers need to band together and we say we need to push back against the narrative when we say you need to love people more than you love cars. Like we aren't just saying it and the people that we are just saying it's so true isn't because we're just saying it because we

Kyle Mountsier: 4:12

meet in our time no our travel our energy, our thoughts our intention around it because we know it to be money and need future. Money. Everything. Literally so like our family's riding on the back of that truth.

Paul Daly: 4:26

Let's go. Okay, that thing. I guess we

Kyle Mountsier: 4:29

got to talk about some news. That's speaking the truth. Big way.

Paul Daly: 4:35

All right. All right, for it expects its internal combustion engine volume and profits to continue to grow until 2025. At four capital markets day 2023, which is just yesterday, executives outline their projections for Ford blue, which is the company's gasoline powered segment. According to Kumar gal Horta, head of Ford blue profit margins from their ice vehicles will grow from 7.2% today to at least 10% By the year 2026. So they are on the rise. And they're saying these profit margin increases are mainly attributed to a reduction in complexity. That means fewer parts. They have successfully released parts per vehicle over the past two years. Check this out. The Ford F 150. The upcoming model has 2400 fewer parts compared to the previous version.

Kyle Mountsier: 5:29

Go that's unbelievable, like efficiency gained in that alone is

Paul Daly: 5:35

incredible. Why? Oh, just think supply chain. So total, or this is another staggering. So the total orderable combinations on the Ford Explorer have been reduced from hold on to your seat. There were 1900 potential configurations of a Ford Explorer. And they brought that no one knows Dumars.

Kyle Mountsier: 5:58

We're confused.

Paul Daly: 5:59

Like, this is hard, right? It's hard to order an explorer. And now there are only one. Yeah, there's only 23. Now

Kyle Mountsier: 6:09

they went Jordan on him, you know,

Paul Daly: 6:13

the greatness. And also the expedition dropped from 800 configurations down the 32 CEO Jim Farley said Monday, his leadership team now meets once a month he did say it's on a Tuesday to focus on material and supply cost cutting opportunities. And he said that's, I'm starting to see an excitement around waste elimination. It's not task assigned. So it's no longer like, Hey, you have to reduce waste. Now. It's like everyone's like, hey, look, I just cut out like figurations 20 to 20. Yeah, right. So. So this is a this is a cool, I think this is a really cool story of just leadership and company development on a pivot, you know, like, they're saying, Hey, we know EVs are running at a loss right now they are projected to be at, you know, at a profit, but they're like, What can we do with what we have to provide for the future innovation that the company needs? So I love the culture side of it too?

Kyle Mountsier: 7:07

Well, yeah. And it's shifting expenses and profit margins so that they can continue to build the startup brand of the EVS. You know, this is this is an intelligent way for any business to operate to look at waste. And and here's it, forget waste, the complexity of 1900 options of build type in an explorer, for a family that shopping and trying to do all that on their mobile phone and figure out what to buy or not, is unbelievable. So if you felt like they probably haven't even factored in, what the shopping journey now looks like, and how buying may actually accelerate

Paul Daly: 7:53

March will accelerate. May Yeah, just every bit of retail conventional wisdom tells tells us that the more complex the more options, the more people move away from the product. Right? That's why good, better best works. That's why do you want the red one or the blue one works? And think just think of the six of the web dev seen. The web dev team is like you're like us? Because everybody's like, how do you make 1900 options work? Like

Kyle Mountsier: 8:22

conditional formatting on the if then statements, there's so much we're doing unbelievable. Yeah. So just like me think about that just at any business. Understanding how to reduce complexity, streamline stuff, make it easier to do people's jobs, reduce expenses, increased net profitability. Those are things that I think we all from a leadership perspective should be looking at. It's an encouragement to me it's like hey, what what waste do we have in the tech stack? Or what waste do we have in our in our general output? How can we streamline and focus on the things that need to be focused on speaking of things that need to be focused on segue

Paul Daly: 9:03

very good signal

Kyle Mountsier: 9:05

gives released recently check this out. I'm gonna run this because you got the last one because that's all you because it's about newly formed evey industry consortium has been announced it is called charge x and is led actually by the Department of Energy. It aims to enhance the reliability and usability of public Evie charging infrastructure in the US by get this June 2025. It includes over 30 companies, including Tesla and Electrify America and ChargePoint, as well as many OEMs. The consortium will work together to define charging experience, address charging, reliability and usability issues and develop solutions for scaling, reliability. So they're tackling a few different issues with this charge X program. Basically, they want to make sure that consumers get it Great charging experience. They have great reliability and usability. So it's easy to use. And they always have uptime. And then they want to make sure that their systems for scaling, right, so how do we get all of these Evie chargers in into a network across the country, so that we don't have issues of range anxiety or anything like that? This is we've talked about many times before these kind of like standardizations, or group projects around new initiatives. You know, one of the early earliest ones was was Bluetooth. We've got API standards out there. There are and so it's just like, the standardization for scalability. And user D complexity is not something that's brand new, but it is really, really new, because a lot of these players haven't been excited about kind of like integrating their platforms to this point.

Paul Daly: 10:55

All right, I have a few things. Number one,

Kyle Mountsier: 10:58

tell me did you see that?

Paul Daly: 10:59

Did you see the part where it's run by the government? Governments? And did you see that part? You know what, Paul? I was trying to? I'm not done yet. I'm not done yet. Secondly, I something was remote. When I read the names, something reminded me of something else. charge. Charge X, like, you know, here's, here's this is my, somebody was like, oh, Elon is gonna be there. Let's name it charge X. Yeah, let's say we charge X maybe. And what does it look like, when you have Tesla in the room? And it's like, okay, well, how are you not like, Well, what do you guys think? Like, what do you

Kyle Mountsier: 11:41

what do you got 50 people in the room? What do you want to? You know? Well, I

Paul Daly: 11:46

mean, like, look, I love the idea. And I say this, this is partially joking. Partially serious, though. Let's see if some real tech innovation collaboration can happen inside a government program, because there really is the greater good being focused on how can we get standards that the innovators are now a part of setting the tone for, right, because typically, a lot of times like there'll be some advisory, but then like, a new thing will be raised up. But it sounds like from the name, that there's already a bit of a nod to the fact that Tesla's figured a few things out with all of their experience. And, you know, things like making sure there's a just a solid handshake when when you get there, right, that the you're ready to like charge when the vehicle shows up, that you're able to pay easily. That's obviously a big consideration. And people forget, which app do I use? Where's the state? How do I pay for this? And one of the other things they talked about in the article is really unifying the charge points on every mapping system. So that it's very clear where the nearest charge point is, that way, you know, I by rented a Tesla one points, I couldn't see what this is about. And the fact that the car actually has to warm up for a charge was something I didn't realize. But when you're driving, you get near a charger that should the car goes in the mode, it makes us really high pitch. I've kind of sensitive ears. So it's like, why is the car like whining right now? Yeah, it's really weird. But even so like so very practical problems. Very smart people in the room, a very tech savvy forward name, how could it possibly fail? How could

Kyle Mountsier: 13:20

it fail? It kind of has to work at this point. Because if it doesn't, then we're not going to create the efficiencies necessary to be the charging infrastructure that the government has kind of forced down from an Eevee efficiency by 2020.

Paul Daly: 13:37

I thought you were gonna say our throats.

Kyle Mountsier: 13:42

Well, I mean, the map thing, I think, is is the key piece here. Because, you know, if you like hit Google, the, you know, or your Apple Maps or anything like that, like one of the little icons is like gas stations, right? It's just like an easy click. And so I think like, just from

Paul Daly: 14:02

there just has to be like charging stations, right? That's gonna be necessary. Yep. Especially like being able to filter those quickly by like level threes, level twos, etc, etc. Yep. Speaking of credibility. I'm trying to get a good set, none of that going on. Speaking and none of that time. All right. footlocker sales have plummeted by 27%, as the retail retailer adjusted their 2023 guidance, due to a surprising decline in sneaker sales. They cited external factors like inflation and a shift toward discretionary spending only our key contributors to the downturn so they had basically stronger than expected holiday sales. So like, hey, things are looking great holiday sales are up stock prices up. I think the stock price dropped by like 30% yesterday. 27% actually, so holiday spending was way up. So they're like hey, feeling good. Consumers are confident however, um, There was a very major shift in q1 and discretionary spending shifting towards services instead of items just happened super fast. Also, tax returns are at a 10 or on average 10% lower than they were last year. And so that's

Kyle Mountsier: 15:14

that's a really interesting sub fact that should tie to like a lot of things that we talked everything that there's 10% less cash going into bank accounts this month,

Paul Daly: 15:24

US government cash, right. And that and tax income, like tax return cash is always like, this is the money we're going to just spent on the thing that I didn't want to spend on right like that money is the fastest spent there. So basically, they're saying, we have to react to this. They're going to increase their promotional activities throughout the year. And they did said they're going to target the active athlete if you know anything about Nike and Nike brand. Nikes basically says, you know, Nikes are for athletes. And if you have a body you are an athlete, right so they were like everyone can wear a Nike footlocker is like we're gonna target active athletes, because again, active the discretionary lifestyle purchases of sneakers in their stores, at least are going down. Here's the kicker. Now here's the kicker.

Kyle Mountsier: 16:09

I want the kicker Hold on. I want the kicker because I've read the full article I don't know if you read this part. But it said thanks to Beaver Toyota of coming Brook furnace and Paul J daily. Nike online sneakers are up and q

Unknown: 16:26

if you know any of those people, including Paul, yeah, there it is. He's already contributing some of their

Kyle Mountsier: 16:36

Nikes online online sales have been up. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, Nike has a has an audience a targeted audience a specific audience. They care for that audience well in a lifecycle marketing

Paul Daly: 16:49

and great online experience, experience an incredible

Kyle Mountsier: 16:54

and even like they have their own kind of like stock X feel right where they have like Premiere or preview type sneakers like knickers, right. A brand around buying. Right. And one of the comments I see. Yeah.

Paul Daly: 17:08

One of the comments in this retail wire article. I love the comments section of their article specifically. And, and and the person was like, Well, I don't know for whatever it's worth my my 20 year old sneaker fanatic Nike loving son has never stepped foot in a footlocker. That's right. So, I don't know that is what it is. Hey, without a doubt things are shifting which means opportunity for everyone who's paying attention. Tomorrow you have an opportunity to join us on the live stream please, please, please have the premiere episode of more than cars.tv

‍