The Liquidation Industry Is Evolving.
So Is the Field Side.

What the Field Side Still Looks Like

Every retail liquidation depends on sign walkers. They stand at intersections near the store holding "STORE CLOSING" signs. They are the most direct advertising a GOB sale has. On a busy Saturday, a sign walker at the right intersection can visibly drive 10x foot traffic into a store that otherwise looks like every other closed storefront on the block.

The typical store closing uses 2 walkers on weekends. Not 8. Not 6. Two.

When one of them does not show up, half the store's street-level advertising disappears. And right now, the way that gets discovered is a phone call 25 min later or even worse, on Monday morning, two days after the shift was supposed to happen.

Here is how verification works today at most operations:

We recruit the people who wave with the signs. We deploy them. A supervisor or the sign waver reports back that they were there. The person sending the workers is the same person confirming the work got done. Hopefully someone lets a liquidation consultant know that walkers arrived and communicates in real time, but people make mistakes.

That is not a technology problem anyone ignored. It is a field-level problem that the field side was never resourced to solve. The firms that run these deals built incredible analytics for the business side because that is what their leadership understood. The field side ran on relationships and trust because that is what worked at a smaller scale. I know, because I have been inside that system since 1998. It made sense for the world it was built in.

But the scale changed.

Where Scale Started Stretching the Old Model

In 2025, the industry saw over 8,200 store closures, one of the highest years on record. JOANN alone was 790 stores across 49 states. Big Lots was 869. These are not single-store operations where a consultant can drive past and check on their crew.

The shift to multi-firm joint ventures made it harder. Francesca's has three firms running 254 stores across 45 states. Eddie Bauer has two firms running 174 stores coast to coast. American Signature had three firms across 89 stores in 13 states. When multiple firms share a deal, each one has its own field consultants, its own sign vendors, its own regional managers. Nobody has a clean line of sight across the whole operation.

And the economics are unforgiving. Liquidation fee structures typically cut advertising spend first when margins tighten. Sign walking is an advertising line item. If you cannot prove walkers showed up, that line item is the first thing that gets questioned. Unverified shifts are not just a no-show problem. They represent budget leakage that compounds across hundreds of stores.

Then there are the multi-contract stores. A luxury retailer might have one deal for the main floor and a separate contract for the jewelry department. Same building, different vendors, different sign crews. A consultant managing both has to track two sets of walkers reporting to two different chains of command. On paper. In a spreadsheet. With phone calls.

These are not hypothetical friction points. Anyone who has been on the field side of a 400-store liquidation knows exactly what this feels like.

What We Keep Hearing from the Field

I have been coordinating sign crews since the late 1990s. Over the last few years, the same frustrations keep coming up in conversations with consultants and regional managers on active deals.

They do not want an app. Gig workers will not download an app for a one-day shift. They do not want another dashboard that adds a layer of reporting on top of 12-hour days. They do not want a platform that requires training or onboarding or IT support at locations that will be empty in 8 weeks.

What they keep describing, in different words every time, is something invisible. Something that gets out of the way.

That is what we have been building with OnPost. A link fires to a walker's phone before their shift. They tap it, their GPS is captured, they take a photo of the sign, and they are done. No app. No login. No training. The regional manager gets a notification. The liquidator gets a notification. A proof page is generated with GPS coordinates, timestamped photos, and an audit trail.

A few consultants on recent deals have already used it. The reaction is not "this is cool technology." It is "why didn't this exist 10 years ago?"

That question is what keeps us refining it. Every deal teaches us something new about how the field side actually operates, and we fold that back in.

But shift verification is just the starting point. The next layer is exec visibility. When a liquidation firm's leadership can see the status of their sign operations across every store in a deal without calling anyone, without waiting for a Monday morning report, the entire relationship between the field side and the business side changes. Their consultants get notified automatically. Their executives get transparency into what is actually happening at street level. And if they want that data flowing into whatever systems they already use, it plugs right in.

That is what field infrastructure looks like when it is built to meet the business side where it already operates.

What Changes as the Field Side Catches Up

When every walker shift produces a proof page instead of a phone call, the trust chain starts to shift. The regional manager does not have to self-report. The consultant does not have to drive to every intersection. The liquidation firm does not have to wonder whether advertising budgets are being spent on walkers who actually showed up.

The field side of this industry has been held together by relationships and phone calls for 30 years. That worked when the biggest deal was 200 stores. Payless was 2,500. At that scale, it needs support.

The business side evolved because institutional money demanded it. The field side is evolving now because the people who have been doing the work are finally building the tools the industry always needed. We are one of them, and we are still listening.