There are some very interesting (and some wacky) ideas of how retail will change after this crisis. Here’s a hint: in the long term anything that increases friction for retailers or shoppers just won’t fly.
Anything which removes comparative or competitive advantage from retailers probably won’t fly. Retailers will share certain systems and platforms but they won’t want to share all of them.
Anything that adds to cost and provides little sales benefit won’t take root. Retail will be even more frugal after this is over. Only the ideas that save money or drive sales will be prioritized.
Anything that makes retail more closed and restricted and impedes footfall or traffic wont be viable. The whole industry and it’s economics are built around openness.
In all of this it’s important to draw a distinction between the short and medium terms and the long term.
The short and medium terms are about mitigating this crisis. We will see temporary solutions that break some of retail’s traditional rules. This is about survival. But COVID-19 is temporary, at some point it will end.
And then we move to the longer term, and this is when the inconvenient solutions implemented as survival mechanisms will be ditched.
None of this is to suggest that retail and consumers won’t change; there will be shifts. But those shifts will work to the advantage of retailers and consumers, not against them.
One thing that is enormously frustrating is the amount of idiotic technological ideas that purport to transform retailing when they do nothing of the sort. It’s all solutions in search of a problem.
I think we’re seeing more of this during the current crisis. It’s augmented by a sense of wanting to forecast something dramatic or radical on the horizon. Proper assessment relies on understanding the true realities of retailing and consumer demand.
That might produce a more mundane view, but often that’s the right view.
