April 27, 2026
Jetcityimage2/Depositphotos.com
What Does Being a ‘Trustworthy’ Company or Brand Actually Mean in Retail?
Via its most recent ranking in the form of a “Most Trustworthy Companies in America 2026” report, Newsweek provided a gargantuan list of trusted — at least according to 25,000 U.S. consumers polled — companies across a variety of industries, including retail.
In remarks attached to the report, editor-in-chief of Newsweek, Jennifer Cunningham, underscored the importance of trust in a highly volatile world.
“In an era defined by a profound crisis of grievance, a corporation’s integrity is no longer a marketing luxury—it is its most volatile and valuable currency. True leadership requires more than just high-level strategies; it demands a radical, lived transparency that bridges the chasm between executive perception and the lived reality of the consumer,” Cunningham said.
The retail rankings provided were outlined as follows.
- Chewy
- Costco
- Amazon
- Academy Sports and Outdoors
- The Home Depot
- Tractor Supply
- Lowe’s
- Ace Hardware
- Barnes & Noble
- Ulta Beauty
- Kirkland’s
- L.L.Bean
- Cabela’s
- Bass Pro Shops
- PetSmart
- Walmart
- Harbor Freight
- BJ’s Wholesale Club
- Belk
- Michaels
Followed by Hobby Lobby, Menards, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Brookshire Brothers rounding out the top 25. Notable entries near the bottom of the list were QVC (at No. 55), The Container Store (at No. 58), Ollie’s Bargain Outlet (at No. 59), Burlington Stores (at No. 60), and Neiman Marcus (taking the last spot, in 64th place).
A relatively recent SAP report collated data from various sources — including Deloitte and Gallup — to suggest a few arguments tied to consumer trust in today’s retail environment: that younger generations were more demanding of retailers, particularly around sustainability and social standards; that trust definitively erodes with data breaches or mishandling of customer data; that shoppers are finding it easier to swap loyalties given the proliferation of online shopping; and that social media platforms serve as a venting ground for dissatisfied customers.
SAP’s report suggested a three-part solution of sorts: the ability to demonstrate capability and reliability to customers when things get tough or problems rear their head; the appointment of a chief trust officer to be empowered with (and responsible for) handling all tasking related to ensuring fulfillment of the brand’s customer promise; and the centrality of transparency and disclosure when it comes to operating principles and methods, sharing information whenever appropriate.
Newsweek’s List of Trusted Companies Draws Some Criticism on Social Media
A few critics of Newsweek’s list appeared in comments attached to Newsweek CEO Dev Pragad’s sharing of the report. One commenter by the name of Jeon critiqued the list as an assortment of business “giants” which created a structural wall of gatekeepers, asking “Are we fostering genuine transparency, or simply certifying a ‘Senate of Corporations’ to dictate the future standards?”
A second commenter added a more moderate critique, asking a question as well. “Can trust really be measured… or just approximated through surveys and perception? Because real trust shows up in behavior, especially when things go wrong,” AJ Berman, CEO of ShareEcard, wrote.
BrainTrust
Doug Garnett
President, Protonik
Peter Charness
Retail Strategy - UST Global
Jeff Hall
President, Second To None
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
How much stock do you place in Newsweek’s survey rankings? What do the results say to you, in terms of what consumers consider trustworthy retail fundamentals?
Are the criticisms levied at the rankings fair or accurate, in your opinion?
What do you think about the three cornerstones of trust outlined by the SAP report?
Poll
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What a surprising list. No Apple. No Trader Joe’s. I’d love to learn more about the selection criteria for respondents.
TJ: exactly!
Some of it can be found in this statement: “evaluations that reflected the perspectives of consumers, employees and investors”. Wait. What?
Here’s their full discussion of methodology. AFTER surveying there is a “social listening” filter. Wait, what?
Worse, they evaluated “how customers viewed the company” — which is meaningless in consumer trust. What matters is how customers view the brand, product, or store — NOT the company itself.
This is really bad research.
So what one thing did we learn from this list?
> How little we can trust Newsweek
Both the Newsweek survey and the SAP framework treat trust as something brands build and project. Consumers experience it differently: something they extend and withdraw based on accumulated evidence. That asymmetry explains everything interesting about this list.
Trader Joe’s absence is the proof. No loyalty app, no advertising, no digital footprint. The survey can’t find it. Yet its customers are among the most devoted in retail. Bigger footprint, bigger ad spend, higher score: the methodology rewards visibility, not trustworthiness. The SAP “Chief Trust Officer” prescription makes the same error. When a company needs a C-suite title to enforce trustworthiness, the culture has already lost the argument.
Trust is built in the small moments when a brand keeps its word.
Was the product in stock? Did pickup happen when promised? Was pricing clear? Did an associate solve the issue without friction? Those everyday moments are where trust is either earned or lost.
In our work, customer trust is nurtured inside the touchpoints. Every store visit, website session, call center interaction, delivery, return, and follow-up email is a chance to reinforce confidence or create doubt. The brands that win are the ones that make consistency feel effortless.
A few truths:
• Trust starts with reliability
• Transparency matters more than polished messaging
• Empowered frontline employees create trust faster than anything else
• When something goes wrong, recovery often matters more than perfection
Customers do not expect retailers to be flawless. They expect them to be honest, responsive, and human.
In the end, trust is simply the sum of experiences a customer can count on.
Exactly. “Customers do not expect retailers to be flawless. They expect them to be honest, responsive, and human.”
We need to start by noting what this is not — a customer trust survey. Instead, “evaluations that reflected the perspectives of consumers, employees and investors”. Wait. What? Mixing employees and investors with consumers? That’s a strange choice.
Ignoring their list, then, we must ask ourselves what “trust” might mean here? Trust, after all, is thoroughly contextual. Mean people can be trusted to always be mean. We do not know, though, how Newsweek determined a single rating of “trustworthiness.”
Further, it is not clear that trustworthiness turns into “more business.” Certain types of reliance on brands gain profit by continually delivering experiences of a specific sort — that specific taste and texture of Doritos for example. Separated from “trusted to deliver that Doritos taste and texture” any idea of Doritos trustworthiness is meaningless to consumers. A Doritos trustworthiness to always deliver the product that was ordered is a trustworthiness which matters only to retailers.
The most critical issue for both retailers and brands, then, is that they continually and reliably deliver to consumers their product and experience which is unique. Such trustworthiness is, then, different in each and every situation, different between consumers and investors; different between consumers and employees.
I tend to view rankings like Newsweek’s “Most Trustworthy Companies” as directionally interesting—but not definitive. The methodology behind these lists is often robust, drawing on tens of thousands of survey responses and over 100,000 evaluations across customers, employees, and investors . That gives them scale and a level of credibility. And when you look at the retail names that rise to the top—companies like Costco, Amazon, Home Depot, and Walmart—it reinforces what most retail professionals already know: trust is built on consistent execution at scale.
But that’s also where I place some limits on these rankings. Retailing itself is best left to professionals, and I’d argue that assessing retailer performance is similar. Journalists and industry experts who follow these companies day in and day out often have a deeper understanding of operational realities, competitive dynamics, and long-term performance than broad-based surveys can capture. So while these rankings are useful signals, they shouldn’t be treated as a final scorecard.
The results themselves do point to some clear fundamentals of trust in retail:
- Consistency and reliability (in-stock, fulfillment, pricing integrity)
- Value and transparency
- Customer experience and service
- Brand reputation built over time
Those are not new ideas—but the fact that they continue to surface tells you something important: trust in retail is still earned through execution, not messaging.
As for criticisms of the rankings, I think many are fair. Surveys capture perception at a moment in time, and perception can lag reality—or be influenced by factors outside the core retail experience. They also tend to flatten nuance across categories and business models. A specialty retailer and a mass merchant may be judged on the same criteria, even though their operating models—and customer expectations—are very different.
On the SAP framework around the three cornerstones of trust (often cited as competence, reliability, and integrity), I generally agree with the premise. But again, in retail, those concepts come to life in very practical ways:
- Competence = having the right product, at the right time, at the right price
- Reliability = delivering on the promise, every time
- Integrity = being transparent and fair with customers and partners
Ultimately, trust in retail isn’t theoretical—it’s experiential. Customers decide who they trust based on what happens when they shop, not what appears in a ranking or a report. Those rankings can be helpful indicators, but the real scorecard is still written every day in stores, online experiences, and customer interactions
Trust is where perception meets proof.
I place some stock in rankings like this because they show how consumers feel in a moment, but real trust is earned in the behavior after the survey. Do customers come back? Do they forgive the mistake? Do they believe the promise enough to choose you again?
The retailers near the top understand the basics. Reliable product, clear value, easy access, strong service, and follow through when something breaks. That is trust at retail level.
The criticism is fair. Big brands often get the benefit of awareness. Scale does not create trust. Execution does.
The SAP points are right directionally, but trust cannot live in one title. A chief trust officer may create ownership, but the work has to sit across merchandising, stores, digital, marketing, fulfillment, and service.
Trust is the operating system.Customers trust what they can count on.
Agree with most that this survey misses the reality of trustworthiness. The basic question was “I would trust this company…” and similar. Limitations on the market such as $500million min threshold plus only US companies (Trader Joes is owned by the same folks as Aldi Nord) plus actively filtering out companies who have been involved with a scandal all bias any level of understanding real trust in a company, brand, product, operations or even delivery times. The type of trust matters. The concept adds in the oddity of investors and employee trust which complicates any indexed score even further.
Frankly, it’s a shot at something that is difficult to capture- so kudos for that, but I would trust my mom and pop pizza store in my neighborhood over any of these companies. They sponsor my kids baseball team, have pictures of high school teams on every wall, gives away soda to folks coming in for a slice and even re-cooked a pie I dropped on the way out the door and are a neighborhood landmark for 20 years. I regularly converse with the owner and staff and trust they will do the right thing by their customers. How do you capture that in a single shot survey?
This type of study covers trust perception based on operational impact and brand perception, not actual trust. In a time filled with duplicity and deepfakes, this study misses the reality of trust.
Skeptical, at best.
I question what’s being measured here and on what criteria? Trust isn’t a metric, it’s a feeling built over time through experience. It comes down to whether a brand shows up consistently. Is it honest, reliable and transparent? Does it actually make the customer’s life easier? That’s what earns trust.
This list seems to reflect scale and familiarity, which is very different from trust.
Trader Joe’s is missing. Apple is missing. Ollie’s Bargain Outlet made the list and Walmart didn’t? Okay…
The methodology is a blend of consumer comments and mined social media chatter. In other words, highly manipulatable and tough to verify.
Yeah, I’m not buying it.
Cutting right to the chase, Georgeanne.
Looks to me like 3 solutions to Trust designed by a committee or generated by an AI model that needs more training. Trust needs to be defined from a Customer standpoint meeting the usuals….. Product that meets or exceeds expectations, pricing that is fair, frictionless checkout and returns. I’d like to add one more to the usuals – a Customer Service capability that is penetrable with normal logic,and doesn’t require hours of shopper time to sort through.
Trust in retail is built through consistent execution. Customers judge trust based on what actually happens: is the product as described, is the price fair, does it arrive on time, and how smoothly are issues resolved.
What’s changing is that trust is becoming more transparent and immediate. With more information, reviews, and now AI-driven comparisons, customers can validate claims instantly. That raises the bar — any gap between promise and reality is quickly exposed.
So being a trustworthy brand isn’t about perception anymore. It’s about operational reliability at scale.
I agree with others that Apple, TJ not being there is a surprise.
In retail, there are a lot of dimensions to trust. Trusting a retailer to do the right thing. Trusting it to correct mistakes. Trusting its products. Trusting it delivers on the promise of its proposition. And so forth. That makes trust complex and very nuanced. And for the consumer these things accrue over time to create a feeling that is hard to measure quantitatively. So while the list is interesting, it has to be taken with a pinch of salt rather than as a definitive ranking.
The results suggest the most trusted brands obsess over their customers rather than their competition. They listen to customers, consistently deliver their brand promise and continuously refine their operations to serve shoppers better.
Regrettably, the survey and the question for discussion are not closely related. So, as to an answer to the question, trust is comprised of many factors:
• Reliable in-stock position
• Perceived Value
• Consistent on-time delivery of online orders
• Consistently good product quality
• Frictionless resolution of issues (returns, credits, refunds)
If a retailer can meet at least these five criteria, consumers will trust the retailer.
As I look at Newsweek’s list of the “Most Trustworthy Companies,” most people won’t argue with the brands that made the list. However, there are plenty of companies and brands that deserve to be on this list, as well. Being on this list is nice, but in the end, the customer will decide. And the list we should focus on isn’t public, but rather in our customers’ minds. If they trust us at this level, we should be VERY happy!
How about 3 really simple metrics as the cornerstones? Honesty, quality, and consistency. Those add up to predictability. Without predictability there is no trust. If a brand is not predictable in its offering, pricing, quality, currency, and overall execution, then why would they even stay on my radar…???
A Chief Trust Officer? Ridiculous. The trust that a customer eventually comes to hold in a brand or retailer will be because the entire TEAM performed their jobs consistently over time. That’s not a CTO with a bunch of checklists. That’s a TEAM that operates with mutual respect of each other, the goal, and the customer.
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What a surprising list. No Apple. No Trader Joe’s. I’d love to learn more about the selection criteria for respondents.
TJ: exactly!
Some of it can be found in this statement: “evaluations that reflected the perspectives of consumers, employees and investors”. Wait. What?
Here’s their full discussion of methodology. AFTER surveying there is a “social listening” filter. Wait, what?
Worse, they evaluated “how customers viewed the company” — which is meaningless in consumer trust. What matters is how customers view the brand, product, or store — NOT the company itself.
This is really bad research.
https://assets.newsweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Methodology_Most-Trustworthy-Companies-in-America-2026.pdf
So what one thing did we learn from this list?
> How little we can trust Newsweek
Both the Newsweek survey and the SAP framework treat trust as something brands build and project. Consumers experience it differently: something they extend and withdraw based on accumulated evidence. That asymmetry explains everything interesting about this list.
Trader Joe’s absence is the proof. No loyalty app, no advertising, no digital footprint. The survey can’t find it. Yet its customers are among the most devoted in retail. Bigger footprint, bigger ad spend, higher score: the methodology rewards visibility, not trustworthiness. The SAP “Chief Trust Officer” prescription makes the same error. When a company needs a C-suite title to enforce trustworthiness, the culture has already lost the argument.
Trust is built in the small moments when a brand keeps its word.
Was the product in stock? Did pickup happen when promised? Was pricing clear? Did an associate solve the issue without friction? Those everyday moments are where trust is either earned or lost.
In our work, customer trust is nurtured inside the touchpoints. Every store visit, website session, call center interaction, delivery, return, and follow-up email is a chance to reinforce confidence or create doubt. The brands that win are the ones that make consistency feel effortless.
A few truths:
• Trust starts with reliability
• Transparency matters more than polished messaging
• Empowered frontline employees create trust faster than anything else
• When something goes wrong, recovery often matters more than perfection
Customers do not expect retailers to be flawless. They expect them to be honest, responsive, and human.
In the end, trust is simply the sum of experiences a customer can count on.
Exactly. “Customers do not expect retailers to be flawless. They expect them to be honest, responsive, and human.”
We need to start by noting what this is not — a customer trust survey. Instead, “evaluations that reflected the perspectives of consumers, employees and investors”. Wait. What? Mixing employees and investors with consumers? That’s a strange choice.
Ignoring their list, then, we must ask ourselves what “trust” might mean here? Trust, after all, is thoroughly contextual. Mean people can be trusted to always be mean. We do not know, though, how Newsweek determined a single rating of “trustworthiness.”
Further, it is not clear that trustworthiness turns into “more business.” Certain types of reliance on brands gain profit by continually delivering experiences of a specific sort — that specific taste and texture of Doritos for example. Separated from “trusted to deliver that Doritos taste and texture” any idea of Doritos trustworthiness is meaningless to consumers. A Doritos trustworthiness to always deliver the product that was ordered is a trustworthiness which matters only to retailers.
The most critical issue for both retailers and brands, then, is that they continually and reliably deliver to consumers their product and experience which is unique. Such trustworthiness is, then, different in each and every situation, different between consumers and investors; different between consumers and employees.
I tend to view rankings like Newsweek’s “Most Trustworthy Companies” as directionally interesting—but not definitive. The methodology behind these lists is often robust, drawing on tens of thousands of survey responses and over 100,000 evaluations across customers, employees, and investors . That gives them scale and a level of credibility. And when you look at the retail names that rise to the top—companies like Costco, Amazon, Home Depot, and Walmart—it reinforces what most retail professionals already know: trust is built on consistent execution at scale.
But that’s also where I place some limits on these rankings. Retailing itself is best left to professionals, and I’d argue that assessing retailer performance is similar. Journalists and industry experts who follow these companies day in and day out often have a deeper understanding of operational realities, competitive dynamics, and long-term performance than broad-based surveys can capture. So while these rankings are useful signals, they shouldn’t be treated as a final scorecard.
The results themselves do point to some clear fundamentals of trust in retail:
Those are not new ideas—but the fact that they continue to surface tells you something important: trust in retail is still earned through execution, not messaging.
As for criticisms of the rankings, I think many are fair. Surveys capture perception at a moment in time, and perception can lag reality—or be influenced by factors outside the core retail experience. They also tend to flatten nuance across categories and business models. A specialty retailer and a mass merchant may be judged on the same criteria, even though their operating models—and customer expectations—are very different.
On the SAP framework around the three cornerstones of trust (often cited as competence, reliability, and integrity), I generally agree with the premise. But again, in retail, those concepts come to life in very practical ways:
Ultimately, trust in retail isn’t theoretical—it’s experiential. Customers decide who they trust based on what happens when they shop, not what appears in a ranking or a report. Those rankings can be helpful indicators, but the real scorecard is still written every day in stores, online experiences, and customer interactions
Trust is where perception meets proof.
I place some stock in rankings like this because they show how consumers feel in a moment, but real trust is earned in the behavior after the survey. Do customers come back? Do they forgive the mistake? Do they believe the promise enough to choose you again?
The retailers near the top understand the basics. Reliable product, clear value, easy access, strong service, and follow through when something breaks. That is trust at retail level.
The criticism is fair. Big brands often get the benefit of awareness. Scale does not create trust. Execution does.
The SAP points are right directionally, but trust cannot live in one title. A chief trust officer may create ownership, but the work has to sit across merchandising, stores, digital, marketing, fulfillment, and service.
Trust is the operating system.Customers trust what they can count on.
Agree with most that this survey misses the reality of trustworthiness. The basic question was “I would trust this company…” and similar. Limitations on the market such as $500million min threshold plus only US companies (Trader Joes is owned by the same folks as Aldi Nord) plus actively filtering out companies who have been involved with a scandal all bias any level of understanding real trust in a company, brand, product, operations or even delivery times. The type of trust matters. The concept adds in the oddity of investors and employee trust which complicates any indexed score even further.
Frankly, it’s a shot at something that is difficult to capture- so kudos for that, but I would trust my mom and pop pizza store in my neighborhood over any of these companies. They sponsor my kids baseball team, have pictures of high school teams on every wall, gives away soda to folks coming in for a slice and even re-cooked a pie I dropped on the way out the door and are a neighborhood landmark for 20 years. I regularly converse with the owner and staff and trust they will do the right thing by their customers. How do you capture that in a single shot survey?
This type of study covers trust perception based on operational impact and brand perception, not actual trust. In a time filled with duplicity and deepfakes, this study misses the reality of trust.
Skeptical, at best.
I question what’s being measured here and on what criteria? Trust isn’t a metric, it’s a feeling built over time through experience. It comes down to whether a brand shows up consistently. Is it honest, reliable and transparent? Does it actually make the customer’s life easier? That’s what earns trust.
This list seems to reflect scale and familiarity, which is very different from trust.
Trader Joe’s is missing. Apple is missing. Ollie’s Bargain Outlet made the list and Walmart didn’t? Okay…
The methodology is a blend of consumer comments and mined social media chatter. In other words, highly manipulatable and tough to verify.
Yeah, I’m not buying it.
Cutting right to the chase, Georgeanne.
Looks to me like 3 solutions to Trust designed by a committee or generated by an AI model that needs more training. Trust needs to be defined from a Customer standpoint meeting the usuals….. Product that meets or exceeds expectations, pricing that is fair, frictionless checkout and returns. I’d like to add one more to the usuals – a Customer Service capability that is penetrable with normal logic,and doesn’t require hours of shopper time to sort through.
Trust in retail is built through consistent execution. Customers judge trust based on what actually happens: is the product as described, is the price fair, does it arrive on time, and how smoothly are issues resolved.
What’s changing is that trust is becoming more transparent and immediate. With more information, reviews, and now AI-driven comparisons, customers can validate claims instantly. That raises the bar — any gap between promise and reality is quickly exposed.
So being a trustworthy brand isn’t about perception anymore. It’s about operational reliability at scale.
I agree with others that Apple, TJ not being there is a surprise.
In retail, there are a lot of dimensions to trust. Trusting a retailer to do the right thing. Trusting it to correct mistakes. Trusting its products. Trusting it delivers on the promise of its proposition. And so forth. That makes trust complex and very nuanced. And for the consumer these things accrue over time to create a feeling that is hard to measure quantitatively. So while the list is interesting, it has to be taken with a pinch of salt rather than as a definitive ranking.
The results suggest the most trusted brands obsess over their customers rather than their competition. They listen to customers, consistently deliver their brand promise and continuously refine their operations to serve shoppers better.
Regrettably, the survey and the question for discussion are not closely related. So, as to an answer to the question, trust is comprised of many factors:
• Reliable in-stock position
• Perceived Value
• Consistent on-time delivery of online orders
• Consistently good product quality
• Frictionless resolution of issues (returns, credits, refunds)
If a retailer can meet at least these five criteria, consumers will trust the retailer.
As I look at Newsweek’s list of the “Most Trustworthy Companies,” most people won’t argue with the brands that made the list. However, there are plenty of companies and brands that deserve to be on this list, as well. Being on this list is nice, but in the end, the customer will decide. And the list we should focus on isn’t public, but rather in our customers’ minds. If they trust us at this level, we should be VERY happy!
How about 3 really simple metrics as the cornerstones? Honesty, quality, and consistency. Those add up to predictability. Without predictability there is no trust. If a brand is not predictable in its offering, pricing, quality, currency, and overall execution, then why would they even stay on my radar…???
A Chief Trust Officer? Ridiculous. The trust that a customer eventually comes to hold in a brand or retailer will be because the entire TEAM performed their jobs consistently over time. That’s not a CTO with a bunch of checklists. That’s a TEAM that operates with mutual respect of each other, the goal, and the customer.