4 Trends That Will
Reshape
Retail In
2019
BIG
S AL E
Digital natives and the brick-and- move to bring 30 “new touch points” to city Walmart, for instance, said in October that
it had robotic units scrubbing the floors at 78
mortar sector will have an increasingly centers over the next three years.
stores and that the initiative was expanding to
symbiotic relationship.
While there was no consensus on the best
physical strategy, one thing was clear: A brick-
and-mortar presence is all but a must to raise
the awareness for digital-native brands and
give their online sales a lift. Amazon had good
reason to embrace brick-and-mortar store
openings, buy Whole Foods and partner with
rival Kohl’s to process returns.
On the other end of the spectrum, while brick-
and-mortar retailers like Walmart and Target
are pitching online ordering for in-store or
curbside pickup, others are opening their doors
and welcoming digital natives to set up shops on
their properties, hoping their cachet can stoke
excitement and foot traffic.
“We recognize that we are in a rapidly changing
retail environment, and to be fit for long-term
growth, IKEA is transforming in a way that lets
us meet our customers where they are,” said Lars
Petersson, IKEA Retail U.S.’s country manager.
Getting closer to customers also means being
right where they live. AT&T said in September
that it plans to open over 1,000 stores in the
next 18 months, including more pop-up stores
inside apartment and condo buildings in urban
areas including New York and San Francisco.
“We want to be as close to the end customers as
we can be,” Rasesh Patel, senior executive vice
president of AT&T Digital, Retail & Care, told
me at the time. “A lot of those customers don’t
own cars. This is very convenient for them. They
don’t have to go out of their way.”
Small and urban will be a major
Robots will be the new model
avenue to growth.
employees.
In the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan,
the departure of a local supermarket has left
a space vacant for well over 18 months. But it
has finally found a new tenant: Target, which
has been dotting New York City with smaller-
format stores since its Tribeca store opened in
2016, has signs on the property announcing its
upcoming arrival, just months after it opened a
store in New York’s East Village, about a mile
away, in July.
With the size of traditional big-box stores
becoming more of an impediment for retailers
who want to get closer to dense urban
populations in areas like New York, smaller-
format stores are the new hip trend. One telling
example: Swedish furniture giant IKEA said that
it’s opening its first-ever U.S. smaller-format city
center store, called the IKEA Planning Studio,
right in Manhattan come spring—part of IKEA’s
Amazon has beat its rivals in the e-commerce
race in part because of its logistics powerhouse.
But it relies on more than technologies like
artificial intelligence and computer vision; also
critical are the roughly 100,000 robots it has
deployed in 26 fulfillment centers globally.
Those robotic drive units not only save employees
time—they don’t have to walk to pick up or
store items—but also allow Amazon to fit more
inventory in its storage space, process package
orders at a much faster pace and open smaller
centers in cities to deliver orders even faster to
customers. For instance, in September, Amazon
opened its first fulfillment center in New York.
Across the board, retailers are seeking to use
robots of different kinds to help spare employees
from menial tasks so they can spend more time
on customer-facing and other assignments.
360 locations.
It will be all about skipping the
checkout line
While Amazon Go may be the gold standard
in terms of giving customers the ability to walk
out of a store without interacting with a cashier,
expect more retailers to come up with their own
features to allow you to bypass those checkout
lines. In one of the most commonly used formats
so far, retailers including Kroger, Dollar General
and Walmart’s Sam’s Club allow customers to
scan and pay for goods on their mobile phones.
The world’s largest convenience store chain,
7-Eleven, has hopped on that bandwagon.
It said in November that it plans to expand
its Scan & Pay service to more cities in 2019
outside its home market of Irving, Texas, and
nearby Dallas.
While 7-Eleven may lack the computer vision
and other wow factors of Amazon Go, which
reportedly is eyeing opening stores inside
airports and overseas in London, that is not a
concern for Gurmeet Singh, 7-Eleven’s chief
digital officer and chief information officer.
“I don’t need to involve another set of technology
if I can solve the speed issue,” he said. “It’s really
about: ‘How do I skip the line?’”
With convenience-seeking consumers getting
less patient and having more choices than ever,
expect these trends to become even bigger in
2019.
(Forbes.com, 12/19/2018)
About the Author:
Andria Cheng is Forbes’ Senior Contributor covering retail,
from fashion to grocery, and its dance with technology.
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