We’re pretty much settled into this whole empty nest thing.

It’s been a full year with both girls out of the house, summer and holidays notwithstanding. I miss them, but I don’t hate it. It helps to have dogs.

Things feel a bit more permanent, as Maddie signed a one-year lease in Astoria last weekend, after crashing in one of my best friends’ basements on the Upper East Side for a couple months. She’s doing a mix of agent-coordinated and open-call auditions most days, in between part-time jobs to pay the bills. She’s already more adept at the subway than I am.

Noelle is fully immersed in college life at Case Western — rowing crew, living in a sorority house, doing two fantasy football leagues, and (I suspect/hope) partying a little more than her sister did. It’s much more relatable to my own college experience, although she’s getting far better grades.

Tara talks or FaceTimes with both of them almost every day, which I’m not even sure was true when they lived here. We were busy as hell at our peak, always running in four different directions. It’s also a different dynamic talking to adult kids (oxymoron intended), more substantive and, frankly, more interesting. At least it sounds that way when I eavesdrop. Most of the calls I get are for streaming passwords and authorization codes. I’ll take what I can get.

Our marriage feels both entirely routine and entirely new — a far cry from the soup we were in seven years ago. We balance an emotional cocktail of longing and incompleteness, accomplishment and adventure. We have ticket packages for the Pittsburgh Penguins, Pitt Women’s Volleyball, and the local theater. We ride bikes, walk the dogs, and just started a massive puzzle that’ll preoccupy us for months. We watch a lot of television.

I’d tell you how long it’s been since we had a legitimate fight about anything, but I’m not sitting near any wood to knock. I don’t recall our marriage being better, speaking for myself.

If I’ve learned anything over 23 years of wedlock and 22 years of parenting, it’s that everything is a phase, the good ones and the bad ones. Soon enough, we’ll be fully retired. Tara might get sick of me when work and travel aren’t keeping me out of her hair. Hopefully, we’ll have grandkids to shuttle around. But that’ll reintroduce more logistics I’ll inevitably screw up. Then, there’s the unavoidable arc of our health — she drew a much better genetic straw than I did.

Or, who knows? Retirement might even be more awesome. In fact, I’m pretty sure it will.

But I’m not wishing today away either.

Here’s what we’re seeing:

AI is shaking up retail faster than I expected. 37% of U.S. adults reported using AI for one or more shopping activities in September, climbing for the eighth consecutive month. ChatGPT dominates consumer usage, with Gemini a distant second. Agentic shopping is particularly prevalent in categories such as grocery and electronics. Then, there are the ripple effects, with product search and discovery shifting rapidly away from search and e-commerce platforms. If you’re interested in all that, I have good news for you. We’ve launched a new Agentic Retail Report, which will track these rapidly changing forces every month. It’s not free — but I’ll probably sprinkle some complimentary nuggets in the occasional weekly email. If you or your team want to learn more — and see the first report — join our upcoming webinar here.

Consumers are starting to sweat their investments. After the barrage of unhappy news last week, I didn’t want to start today on a sour note, but our Consumer Financial Health Index fell for the second straight month in September. For what it’s worth, the numbers are safely above the low point they hit in March, although it may only be a matter of time. What stood out most for me was the steep decline in respondents’ outlook for their personal investments. Obviously, if everyone could predict market shifts, they’d be too busy on their private islands to answer surveys, but this trend line definitely indicates a broad sense of uneasiness.

Gen Z is making workouts a social (media) activity. I first heard of Strava — a fitness app that tracks and shares your workouts with friends — when Noelle started using it this summer, obsessing over how her regimen stacked up to her crew teammates. As we learned in this week’s 3 Things to Know, Strava is a juggernaut, especially among America’s young adults. We also looked at the state of print news readership, which is trending as you’d expect, but still formidable in total size. Finally, we found that Gen Xers outpace even Gen Zs in their admiration for the convenience of payment apps like Venmo and Zelle. Probably because we’re so burned out.

Basically everything we predicted ahead of Amazon Prime Big Deal Days (BDD) turned out to be true. Americans showed up in droves for Amazon’s latest deal-a-palooza last week, where beauty and health purchases reigned supreme just like we told you they would. The next four biggest categories were evenly spread, from electronics to home goods, apparel, and kitchenwares. While 41% of people bought items they planned to buy, nearly as many (39%) made unplanned purchases. Importantly, few shoppers used the event to reduce their overall holiday spending budget — BDD participants are seven percentage points more likely than the U.S. Gen Pop to say they expect to spend more on holiday shopping this year.

Daily video game play is up for every age group except for the one you’d expect. All you need to see is Super Bowl-winning, never-had-a-losing-season former Steelers coach Mike Tomlin’s incredible Minecraft city to realize that online gaming is no longer only the domain of the young. 26% of U.S. adults report playing video or online games daily, up from 16% just four years ago. The rate of growth during that period has been highest among Gen Xers. Surprisingly, daily game playing fell slightly among Gen Z from 2025 to 2026, putting them now a point behind Millennials. It will be interesting to see how the numbers move when the new Grand Theft Auto VI drops.

More “on-brand” awesomeness from the InsightStore™ this week:

  • As we continue to explore the resurrection of brand loyalty in America, this week we examined the importance of emotional connection, values, and representation;
  • We also republished a piece originally written for AdExchanger (by yours truly) explaining how rising brand loyalty and agentic shopping will rebalance the mix of performance marketing and brand marketing in the coming years.

The most popular questions this week:

How comfortable are you with handling confrontation?

How often do you exhaust your social battery?

Do you think you could outrun an adult tyrannosaurus rex?

Do you typically bring your own toiletries when traveling, or do you use the ones provided?

How comfortable are you with operating a record player?

Answer Key: More comfortable than average; Once a month; No, but hopefully I could outrun someone else it’s chasing; I’m BYOT; Very comfortable, even mixing them.

Hoping you’re well.

JD