A funny thing happened on the way to the Retailaggedon. It didn’t happen.
Consider these items from just one day’s news last month: Tractor Supply Co. says it will open 70 to 80 stores in the next year. Uniqlo plans 400 to 500 new stores around the world every year, including quadrupling the number of U.S. stores by 2027. Convenience store chain Wawa looking to add 40 new stores in the southeast over the next few years. Regional grocer Wegmans expanding further into New York City metro area. Fast fooders Popeye’s and Freddy’s Custard are adding hundreds of new stores. Amazon Go opens its first suburban location. Facebook announces its first store ever.
Did all these guys miss the memo about the demise of physical retailing? Don’t they know that e-commerce is the only game in town going forward and that stores are ancient relics of another era? Just wait until their shareholders and investors get word of this.
Of course, the Retailaggedon (who makes up these tongue twisters anyway?) was yet one more sky-is-falling headline, the kind that the media – and the journalists who write for them – just eat up and can’t wait to post on LinkedIn. And as such, it was yet one more prediction made during the height (or depth, perhaps?) of the pandemic times.
And the revival of physical retailing is just one more unintended consequence of the past two years, a list that grows longer every day. Remember when all the experts were predicting the demise of single-car ownership, replaced by ride services, ride sharing, bicycles and drones? Turns out people liked the idea of having their own private form of transportation away from the germ-infested masses. Or how about the death of the suburbs and exburbs as younger generations migrated to cities and urban areas? Yes, even as many American cities have rebounded since the bottom of the pandemic, rural areas are seeing enormous growth from those getting out of town and looking for wide open spaces.
We could go on. Nobody will ever buy groceries online. Business travel will never come back as Zoom/et al become the de facto way meetings are held. Forget about gyms and workout centers; we’ve got our Pelotons and we’re never going back to those places.
The point obviously is that as the past two-and-one-half years have represented unprecedented times they also have made most forecasters and so-called experts look absolutely foolish. Nowhere is that more true than with the predictions about physical retailing (which, by the way, is virtually never made of bricks or mortar). Stores – where people go to shop, but also to just look around as entertainment, as places where they pick-up online orders or return them and as businesses where in-person activities are held – have proven their worth and aren’t going away anytime soon.
You didn’t need me to tell you that.
But maybe you did need to hear that trying to figure out what’s next is no slam-dunk. Steve Jobs used to say he didn’t do market research because people couldn’t tell you what they wanted because they didn’t know it until they saw it.
Warren Shoulberg has reported on the gift and home industry for most of his career. He is often quoted in national media, such as The New York Times and CNN, and contributes to PBM publications, Forbes.com and The Robin Report.
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