Digital Is Destroying Everything by Andrew V. Edwards

Author:Andrew V. Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

Retail Hating Retail

Sometime in the mid-1990s, retailers suffered a crisis of confidence that seems quaint in retrospect, considering the fact they ended up fiercely challenged by a robot competitor they could not have foreseen.

By 1994, retail had determined that retail was flagging. Year-over-year numbers for existing stores were troubling; chains were already ubiquitous. There seemed nowhere to expand. But what caused the rending of garments in the garment trade was the sense—based on research and a general sense of malaise—that people just didn’t so much like shopping any more. Consumerism for the sake of consumerism seemed to have run its course. A population that had grown up on newness and freshness and planned obsolescence seemed to be tiring of the game, and many claimed they just didn’t want to drive to the mall, park a half-mile from the store, trudge through slush, get ignored by bored shopgirls, pay too much, and lug the whole mess back to the car in bags for the long trip back home.

What was retail to do?

They tried specialty stores, because department stores were tanking. They surrendered to the proliferation of outlet malls, where elite brands would offer cut-rate goods in a Potemkin “town center” setting not far from a major population. They tried boosting private labels that would yield higher profit. They talked about focusing on service. And then came digital sneaking around like a pack of alien gremlins at the cash register; and digital grew into an earth-moving machine rasping away at the walls and foundations; and at last retail stopped talking about obscurantist issues like “rack appeal” as it was forced to deal with digital competitors that threatened to empty the mall out for good and all.

None of the big retailers present in the market during the decade of the 1990s turned out to have had anything much to do with the digital revolution. Instead, they watched and waited (Macy’s, Saks, Sears, Nordstrom, Dillard’s, and so on) as brand-new digital shopping centers started taking huge bites out of their already-riven hides in the late 1990s and on into the twenty-first century. Since having gotten a late start, many of these have invested heavily in digital and can boast significant online sales. But their hesitation suggests they missed out on the chance to dominate a new market that left them playing catch-up. While it’s true that there’s a reasonably successful Macys.com and a Walmart.com and a Gap.com, these are undeniably second- and third-tier players in a market they ought to have dominated.

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