The last couple of weeks have been filled with lists that normally commemorate the passing of an old year – or in this case, an old decade. Who’s in, who’s out, what’s changed.
I saw Katy Perry on an “out” list. Unbelievable. My first reaction was, “Who’s Katy Perry? When exactly was she ‘in’?” Jim and Pam were on an “out” list, too, replaced by Leonard and Penny of “The Big Bang Theory.” That’s what she said.
The decade changed much about retailing, too, as would be expected. None of it seemed to be good. Retailing was caught up in a technological revolution, when people had more and quicker access to information, communications and each other, even as their devices became smaller and smaller. Retail began the decade facing the competition of consumers sitting at their desks at home on personal computers. Then it was consumers sitting at tables in “third places” on wireless laptops. But it became consumers walking, driving, relaxing just about anywhere with devices that made phone calls, surfed the web, texted and tweeted and took digital photographs – and fit in their pockets. There’s an app for everything except going into a store to shop.
Retailers have also had to join the revolution with terms and strategies they never envisioned. Nearly every retailer, large and small, has a web site. But more and more find they also have to have a Facebook page and a Twitter account and be part of LinkedIn.
And, of course, retailing has been sucked into the worst economic environment in 75 years. And there’s no app for that.
So has anything good emerged from this decade? I believe we’ll look back on this as the time retailing truly embraced the environment. Throughout the 1990s, the store design industry said the right things about energy conservation and sustainable materials. But their efforts were often thwarted by the cost of sourcing those materials or the time it took, or the lack of resources to meaningfully save energy. But pretty much everyone’s on board now. They build green because they can, because they believe in it and because there’s a roadmap to follow. For retailing – and maybe the world in general – the word of the decade that will resonate, long after we’ve stopped using “Blackberry” and “texting” and “tweeting,” will be LEED. The government, of all people, has shown us the way. And retailers are following.