Digital Retailing Isn’t New — Most People Just Don’t Understand It with Rusty West

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Some conversations age well. Others quietly explain the future before most people realize they’re already living in it.

This one does both.

In this episode of The David Spisak Show, I sit down with Rusty West, a builder, systems thinker, and one of the most consequential architects of modern automotive pricing, payments, and digital transaction logic,to unpack the ideas that reshaped an industry long before the industry had language for them.

This is not a nostalgia episode.It’s a deconstruction of how complex systems actually change.

Rusty doesn’t just tell stories, he reveals why things unfolded the way they did:

  • why Lease Profit had to become Market Scan,

  • why September 11th forced a once-dominant business to reinvent overnight,

  • why “penny-perfect payments” were never about payments at all,and why the future of automotive retail was always going to belong to whoever could normalize chaos into certainty.

We talk deeply about data as leverage, not as buzzwords.

About why digital retailing didn’t fail, it was simply misunderstood.

About how trust is built (and destroyed) through consistency, not convenience.

And about why Amazon, Carvana, and large marketplaces aren’t scary because of scale, but because of foresight.

If you’re a dealer, operator, entrepreneur, technologist, or leader who wants to understand where the leverage is moving, not where it’s been, you’ll want to listen carefully.

This is someone explaining how the chessboard actually works.

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