To try to sum up the past few weeks of 2016 conference season is nearly impossible. Just think: in the name of retail technology I’ve borne witness to Hootie singing country music (JDA), Lionel Richie plugging his new line of kitchenware (Shoptalk), and none other than the prince of darkness, Ozzy Osbourne, wailing his way through the early catalog of Black Sabbath at Netsuite’s annual user group. That’s a recent history a fiction writer couldn’t even make up!

But at the heart of the matter is the content of these shows. And I’m here to tell you that there’s a serious new player on the scene: Shoptalk is the real deal.

Next week I’ll give that show the full writeup it genuinely deserves. In the meantime, there’s one session that seems to have dominated everyone’s tweets, so I’d like to utilize this week to focus on that.

In all the tweets I saw about Ron Johnson’s presentation, no one mentioned the mass exodus of the crowd before he spoke. The room had been packed for Jerry Storch of Hudson Bay and CNBC personality Courtney Ragan’s interview of the Dollar Shave Club guy (of course his name is Michael Dublin, but most people would know him much better as the guy from the viral ads making fun of celebrity endorsements for razor blades. I doubt he’d take offense).

But when Courtney stayed on to interview the CEO of Enjoy, at least a third of the room walked out. I’m guessing that either a) Enjoy doesn’t have the same crowd draw as JC Penney or Apple or b) the audience didn’t connect the dots as to whom was about to speak. But those who forget their history so easily are destined to repeat it.

Enjoy has a very unique business model. They exist solely online, and they’ll sell you the exact same iPhone or GoPro camera that Best Buy would. Except if you’re in one of the cities where they operate, they deliver it to you, personally, no matter where you choose to be. And then the delivery person spends a full hour with you showing you how to use the product. It’s all consumer electronics, for now (it will work for high-end apparel, no doubt) but they’ve delivered drones to Central Park and laptops to coffee shops. And everything they sell is at the exact price you’d pay at a traditional retailer.

“We can charge the same as the Apple Store or Best Buy because we don’t have stores. It’s cheaper to train and salary someone than it is to run a store. ” And mind you, these are real jobs. 40-50k a year for Enjoy employees, with full benefits from day one. “They decide when they want to work, how much they want to work, ” said Johnson. “Retailers have been trying to schedule better for years – this solves that. “

Enjoy has been operating this model publicly for a full year now, but no one in the smaller audience (myself included) had heard of them. Why? “We’re not promoting, ” said the CEO. “Uber’s costs are far too much, and so are Air BnB’s. The cost of a customer to those companies is just too high. So we’re taking a totally different approach. We’ve partnered with AT&T, kind of like the model Amazon used when it was running the online site for Target. ” Clever. And then he added, “We want to actually be around 20 years from now. “

And then the gloves came off. I can’t say whether Ms. Ragan prepped Mr. Johnson for an inquiry about his last, highly-publicized gig, but during her interview with the Dollar Shave Club guy, he made it quite clear that she was asking questions he wasn’t prepared to answer. In a conference world where every panel conversation seems sanitized and pre-scripted, it was very – very – cool to see. So maybe Mr. Johnson knew what was coming. Maybe he didn’t. But when pressed – on a few separate occasions – about what he’d learned from his failure at JCP he was nothing short of candid. More so than I ever expected someone in his position would be.

“Nothing good happens overnight, ” he said. “I was told that people wanted to change, but when I got there, no one really wanted to. They already had the low end customer – why change? “

He went on to describe a painful u-turn that was poorly executed and also executed far too quickly. “I didn’t want to change people’s lives who had been there forever, ” (recall how long that company’s promotional legacy was). “It was a fight. Now I get to hire people one at a time that fit the culture we’re building. ” In a way, it all makes perfect sense. And to see someone who’s been so publicly flogged in the media bare such honesty in this type of setting was nothing short of refreshing. “We want Winners now. People who are smart, interested, and have no ego. We want team players. “

Very cool. I know I, for one, am pulling for him.