AGA Digital Magazine

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“To survive and, hopefully, flourish, retailers must retool for recovery by adopting a consumer-first attitude that includes enhancing the in–store experience as well as preparing for a new era of ‘touchless’ selling.”

but in reality it is about rapidly changing consumer expectations. Online retailers like Amazon have simply been nimbler in meeting these needs.” That may be changing as well, according to observers who note that Walmart is expanding its use of robotics to speed up order fulfillment times in order to defend its position against Amazon Prime’s membership model. At present, the chain is planning to build 20,000–35,000-square- foot within or next to specific stores to cut fulfillment and delivery times. “What we want to do is fill as many orders as we can,” said Tom Ward, Walmart’s senior vice president of customer product. “The system allows us to pick orders and dispense them with great speed.” Details of the time savings have yet to be released. But the issue is much broader than online selling, industry observers said. Retailers have to prove to consumers that their stores are worth visiting and not just dark store repositories for toilet paper, paper towels and sanitizers. “It is an opportunity for flexible retailers to rebrand themselves by keeping consumers center stage in everything from the in-store experience to supply chain strategies,” one consultant noted. This rebranding process could include new locations as well as formats. A business brief by Retail Dive said that with traffic down nearly 50 percent, some normally popular malls are retooling leases as they come out of the pandemic. This includes inviting in new non-retail tenants, according to market research firm Placer.ai. Additionally, the company found that pandemic-related trends will continue, including a boom by value-oriented retailers like dollar stores and other deep discounters, warehouse clubs, Walmart and Target. Still unclear is whether the exodus from the cities like New York

“2021 is set to be an exciting year,” Bollard added. “There may be some difficult times ahead for the industry as a whole. But retailers who implement these strategies, and other innovations will differentiate themselves from their competitors and have a better chance of succeeding.” This may be the key to battling Amazon’s increasingly pervasive presence in retailing. Joe Jensen, vice president of Intel’s IoT group and general manager of retail, banking, hospitality and education has said, “consumers want to remove all the friction and hassle from their life. They’ll gravitate toward what’s easiest every time. So while price is important, experience is even more so. Retailers may blame Amazon for the challenges they face,

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