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VIEWPOINT

T h e R e ta i l A p o c a ly p s e i s B . S .

KEVIN COUPE FOUNDER, MORNINGNEWSBEAT.COM

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” – Apocalypse Now

the things they offer that are not available in a competitor’s store, or on a competitor’s website. I also think it’s going to go beyond products. Bricks-and-mortar stores, I believe, are going to have to evolve past where many of them are now. And fast. I think that if any retailer is planning or building a store without factoring into the plans: a) where the click-and-collect depot will be, and b) how e-commerce can be run out of the store, they ought to be charged with retail malpractice. I think that more retailers ought to be looking to companies like Michigan’s Westborn Market for inspiration. Westborn found an old and decommissioned post office in Plymouth, Mich., and converted it into a beautiful and food-driven store that uses things like mail boxes as design cues; it offers great food and a shopping experience that can’t be replicated online. More companies ought to be looking for unusual venues for stores of varying sizes that compel shoppers to walk in the front door. One other thing that Westborn does is hire great people and invest in them – because in that way, employees will feel invested in the business, creating connections between shopper and (to use an old-fashioned term that ought to be revived for the current age) shopkeeper.

But…it isn’t going to happen today. Or tomorrow. Not for everybody, anyway. That doesn’t mean, however, retailers can rest easy. In fact, just the opposite. The retailers that rest easy are the ones who are in the most trouble, because complacency is a primary sin for anybody trying to succeed in this marketplace. The ones that will succeed, and even thrive, are the ones who understand they have to be constantly listening hard to their customers and then going beyond what they hear to innovate in fundamental ways, adapting to changing consumer behavior, impulses and mindsets as quickly as possible. They are the ones willing to take risks, challenge legacies and traditions, and accept the inevitability that risk means failure, but also not taking risks means irrelevance and obsolescence. These retailers are far less likely to be devastated by any sort of apocalypse because they understand that they cannot simply be an alternative for shoppers. They have to offer distinct and differential advantages. They understand that if 80 percent or more of the products they sell also are sold by the competition, they have to find ways to focus on and draw shoppers’ attention to

“Retail apocalypse” seems be a word pairing that has entered the lexicon. Everybody is writing about it. (I just checked, and Google News offered me more than 53,000 results for the phrase.) Everybody seems to accept it as a current reality. Well, I’m getting really tired of it. I think it represents an awful lot of hand-wringing, whining and glass-is-half-empty thinking. I think it is so much B.S. I’m not saying it’ll never happen. Never is a long time, and I’ve decided to get out of the never business. It doesn’t pay very well, and experience shows that when you say “never,” there’s a pretty good shot that you’re going to be wrong. Eventually. I’m also not saying that there aren’t retailers in trouble. Big trouble. Like, say, Sears… which has been a dead-company-walking for so long that it qualifies for a guest appearance on “The Walking Dead.” There’s no question even retailers that had decent end-of-year holiday shopping seasons in 2017 are facing some significant challenges in 2018. For some, the bombs are ready to be dropped, and there is little they can do to avoid the competitive napalm used by bigger, better funded and more innovative competitors.

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