You repeat the same handful of jobs every day: the register check, the expiry pull, the payment chases. Paying a person to do them feels impossible at $3,500 a month. Reggie, the AI store manager from Idle Work, does work like that for $50 a month, and you keep control of what it does.
What you actually see
Reggie speaks to you over the chat apps you already use, like WhatsApp. Every morning before you open, it reads your register, your books and your bank, then sends a brief in a few plain sentences: what sold, what needs your attention, and what it prepared while you slept.
Here is an example, taken from the sample morning brief shown on the Reggie page. It describes a made-up store and a made-up day, printed as a sample:
Good morning. Yesterday: $4,210 net on 612 sales. Register data as of 6:40 AM. Register 2 ran 14 voids on the evening shift, over your line of 6. Worth a look before tonight. Pull today: 7 items expired overnight, 5 of them in dairy. The pull list is ready. Order before Thursday's delivery: 18 items will run out before the next truck. I drafted the order. Dead stock: $2,340 is sitting in 41 items that have not sold in 60 days. Want me to draft a markdown that keeps your 25% price floor? 9 items fell under your price floor after last week's cost increase. A price preview is ready for your OK. Your retail license renews November 14. That is 50 days out.
Yes, draft the markdown.
Drafted: 41 items, none under your 25% floor. Nothing changes on the register until you say OK.
Those numbers are from the sample, not a promise of what yours will look like. Your brief will be about your store: your expiries, your reorders, your dead stock. The point is the shape. One message, before opening, telling you exactly what today needs.
Why it costs more the longer you wait
Every one of those items is a small leak today and a bigger one next month. Expired stock only becomes visible when a customer buys it and comes back angry. Dead stock ties up your cash and takes shelf space from items that would sell. Prices that fell under your floor after a supplier increase are costing you on every single sale.
A register you never review hides the pattern until it is expensive. Voids, refunds and no-sales by shift are the kind of thing you find when the deposit comes up short, and by then the cause is weeks back. The store manager role exists because this work is worth doing every day, and only a system does it every day.
How you stay in control
Reggie does not start with the keys. You choose how much it does, one level at a time: watch, suggest, act with your OK, or act within limits you set. You raise each level yourself, one at a time, in the app. Idle Work raises nothing for you, and Reggie can never raise its own levels either.
Price changes on the register always need your OK, at every level. And some things are off the table completely. Reggie will never ring a sale, void or refund one, open the cash drawer, move money, text a customer who did not opt in, or tell a customer it is a person. Those hard limits are printed on the Reggie page, not buried in a terms sheet.
This is how every Idle Work agent works. Cally, Otto and Mason all start narrow and earn each step up. Nothing is connected until you connect it, and you revoke any connection whenever you want.
Do it by hand until then
You can do this check yourself. Ten focused minutes, same time every morning:
- Check what expires in the next few days. Pull it before a customer finds it.
- Compare yesterday's deposit against the register report. Look at voids, refunds and no-sales by shift.
- List items with no sales in 60 days. Decide: promote, markdown, or return to the supplier.
- Re-check prices on your top sellers after any supplier costs increase. Did you pass it on?
- Note renewals and filings due in the next 60 days.
None of this is hard. All of it is worth doing, and almost nobody does it every day. That is not a discipline problem. It is an hours problem, and the hours were never there.
The next step
This work is daily, repetitive and numeric, the kind a machine does without getting tired. Reggie does it before you open, in the chat you already read. To find out what it would take over first, book an assessment. Or start an agent yourself: a 14 day trial, then $50 a month from day 15, and cancel before then and you are never charged.