Why Retail Is Far From Dead (And Where It's Headed)

Still trying to figure out where physical retail fits in your channel mix? Season 4 of The Longer Game breaks it down.

Walk into half the marketing conversations happening right now and someone will declare retail dead. Then check the receipts. Even at the height of the pandemic, ecommerce was only about 20% of total sales, which left physical stores doing the other 80%. The store is not going anywhere. What is shifting is what it does and why anyone walks in.

Retail isn't dead, retail is not going to die. Retail is changing. — Al Schuster, President, Polaris Brand Promotions

The change has been building for 20 years

Retail has been evolving since the first person traded one good for another. The pace is what changed. The ecommerce boom pulled the first wave of spending online, and now the second wave is tech moving into the store itself: app ordering, touchscreens, and buy-online-pickup-in-store programs like the ones Walmart and Kroger built to keep pace.

Order a coffee on an app and it appears on your doorstep like room service. That convenience is real, and it is reshaping which trips need a store at all.

What is disappearing is not retail itself, only the store that gives shoppers no reason to walk through the door.

The pickup-counter future

For commoditized goods, the logic is brutal and simple. If you can reorder the same paper towels, the same frozen pizza, the same case of water without thinking, you will. Expect more retailers to shrink the aisle space customers actually browse and convert that square footage into something closer to an order-pickup hub.

That is the half of retail under pressure. The other half is not going anywhere, because people do not only shop for products.

Even in the height of the pandemic, ecommerce was still only 20% of sales that's happening. — Michael Maher, Chief Idea Officer, Cartology

Part of why stores survive is human. People want interaction, engagement, discovery, the ability to see and compare a real item before it comes home. Strip that out and you have not improved the experience, you have removed the reason the trip existed.

Figuring out which channels deserve your investment is the whole game. See how Cartology approaches it.

What this means for your store

The brands and retailers that win the next decade are the ones making a deliberate call about what each store is for. Some categories belong online or at a pickup counter, and forcing a "brand experience" onto a case of bottled water is a waste of money. Other categories live or die on what happens in person, and those deserve real investment in the space, the staff, and the reason to visit.

Treating your store as a default instead of a way to engage your customers is how you end up paying rent on square footage that does nothing.

Retail is not dying so much as splitting into trips that should be frictionless and trips that should be worth showing up for, and knowing which is which is the entire job.