The Lincraft closure made news last week. Eighty years, every store, gone. It’s the kind of story that sits with you if you’ve been in retail long enough to remember when chains like that felt permanent.
We know it hit small business retailers because of conversations we have had since the news broke.
It’s not the whole retail story, though.
The independent retailer who had their best April in three years won’t make the news. Neither will the gift shop owner who spotted a new category gaining ground and moved on it before the season. These things are happening. We see them in the data.
The difference between retailers finding growth and those feeling stuck usually isn’t location or foot traffic or product range. It’s whether they’re looking at their data. Good data, understood and acted on, is the foundation underneath every independent retail success story we see.
Your POS data knows things you don’t. It knows which supplier is quietly underperforming while a newer one gains ground. Which category is lifting your average sale value. Which days your margin is strongest. What your best customers are buying that your average customers aren’t.
The Tower AI tools are built to surface exactly that — the things not sitting in front of you. Not the obvious wins you already know about. The patterns buried in twelve months of transaction data that you won’t catch on a busy Tuesday. A product that’s been growing 15% month on month and still hasn’t made your reorder list. A margin opportunity in a category you’ve been pricing conservatively out of habit rather than intention.
A chain waits for a report from head office. You can act on your data this week, before the next order goes in. That gap is real and it matters.
The pressures Lincraft cited are real too. Changing consumer behaviour, rising costs, overseas competition — none of that is going away. But the response isn’t to carry the weight of the industry headlines. It’s to look inside your own business and find what’s working.
Green shoots don’t announce themselves. They show up as a slow climb in basket size, a category quietly outperforming its shelf space, a customer type coming back more often than they used to. Your data has already found them.
If you haven’t spent time in the Tower reporting and AI insights tools recently, start there. Not with a big strategic review. Just one question: what’s growing in my business right now that I haven’t noticed yet?
The answer is probably already there.
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