I spoke to Doug Straton, the chief marketing officer of Bizarre Voice, who explains more.

I think the big difference now in terms of multisource is, you know, the digital environment has enabled shopping to take place pretty much anywhere.

And so there's an element of what we used to call merchandising that happens in social environments, broader media environments, not just on a product description page within the retail environment.

And people don't engage or spend as much time in any one place for very long or capture words.

and so their ability to kind of see the same message and the same merchandising where it used to be just message and then drive them down the funnel now the message in the merchandising is happening lower upper funnel mid funnel and finally you know true lower funnel and i think that's the big difference it's both the way they're receiving the messages, the way we're merchandising now in the physical and digital environments.

And ultimately, the more times you can hit people with like, this is the message.

And then here are the proof points that bolster the proposition of any given brand, product or service that just drives the behavior further, essentially.

This was the point in my interview with Doug Straton when I stopped thinking specifically about these ghost stores and started thinking about what trust means in the future for independent retailers.