You Have the Stores Right Here

In 2005, when Sears and Kmart announced a merger, I asked a retail professional how two such crippled chains could possibly survive.

“Simple answer,” he said. “4000!”

He was referring to the number of retail locations the combined operations now owned. The value of all that real estate was a powerful hedge against how many Martha Stewart towels or Craftsman tools you did or didn’t sell.

Eight years later, we probably have to rethink the value of real estate (to say nothing of an association with Martha Stewart). But the point remains that the one asset retail has going for it is all that space, those walls, those locations. The question is: What valuable use can you make of it?

We all just got back from IRDC in Vancouver, where I had the pleasure of meeting in person Gideon D’Arcangelo of ESI Design, whom I’d previously talked to only over the phone. ESI made its bones in museum design, so it understands how to make spaces interactive, fun, exciting and worth revisiting time and time again.

Today’s consumers may want to sit and shop for things on the Internet, or go about waving their iPhone at QR codes. And retailers may need to figure out how to become “omnichannel” (ah, the buzzwords just keep coming).

But they also need to figure out how to get people coming through those store doors – a challenge that hasn’t changed since the days of Marshall Field and Isidor Straus.

The onliners have a challenge, too. They’ve mastered all the aspects of selling goods with the exception of delivering the merchandise so quickly that today’s consumer doesn’t even have time to think, “Gee, I ordered it hours ago and I still don’t have it in my hands.”

Some savvy retailers have figured out that the one thing they had that Amazon and Ebay didn’t have was the physical space to serve their own growing cadre of online customers. “Amazon can UPS it to you and you’ll get it some time this week. We can drop it at the closest store to your home and you can go grab it in a couple of hours.”

Hey, said Amazon and Ebay, maybe we ought to build our own stores for that purpose. Or, better yet, let’s hook up with those people who already have the stores. So welcome to “click and collect.”

My point is, the store is again becoming the converging place. And Gideon D’Arcangelo’s point is, if people are coming to your stores only to pick up products they bought online, they’re coming to your stores.

See it as an opportunity to make your stores the most exciting, interesting, interactive, productive, fun, memorable, social, useful – I can keep going, but you have work to do.