Darren Herman

I live in the suburbs of Manhattan and within an 8 minute drive from my home, I’m surrounded with retail stores… and there are a lot of them:  standalone, strip malls, and large malls.  Many of these stores were built when we lived in the industrial revolution society as that’s when urban planning was done for this area.

The industrial revolution is over.  Long ago.

We’re now in the information revolution.  Many things should change in this new chapter of life but the one area I’d like to highlight is the retail experience.

I’ve had many poor experiences lately in retail locations, even from stores which are supposed to have excellent in-store staff.  The more and more I go about my daily life and see how my kids are living theirs, retail stores need to adapt because consumers are now less than 3 clicks away from buying almost any item sold in any store at any time on any day.  Do retail stores really need to be tens of thousands of square feet and sell/stock everything in their catalog which is redundant to their e-commerce store?

Why can’t retail stores be discovery-and-customer-service engines staffed by salaried product specialists?  The actual goods that I might want to buy, maybe outside the top 10, would be ordered online and be delivered to my home or a central pickup area.  Stores would have a lot less overhead, smaller, wouldn’t be competing with their e-commerce P&L, attribution of marketing would be easier (shopping in one place), and product distribution would be easier for brands.  This doesn’t sound half bad…

Retail needs to change.  Just look at Best Buy.