There is no retail apocalypse.

OK, it's a difficult sell I grant you that.

What if I told you this is just how things were supposed to be? A product of our own hubris if you will.

The retailers of yesterday, have simply failed to listen, becoming too big, too quickly and too focused on short term profits and year on year store footprint growth to be able to make changes.

We stopped business' being run by retailers, those who cared about products and people, and allowed our brands to be run by accountants, those whose only concern was the bottom line and the shareholder dividend.

In quick summery this has lead to - across the board - costs slashed, less staff, over optioned stores; as brands clamour to chuck anything at the consumer in the hopes it will stick. Poor merch' planning leaving stores massively over stocked. Over priced real estate meaning brands are squeezed to deliver as much floor space as possible and as little BoH as possible - stock rooms are a thing of the past. Stock is dumped straight on shop floors. Retail isn’t seen as the career it once was, employees feel further and further from decision making or ownership or ability to grow, leaving dead end jobs with people that don’t care, conditioned by a system that isn’t built for them. What happened to the passion, the service?

Many brands are bucking the trend, and the term apocalypse is massively blown out of proportion, those nimble and quick to see the change are leaping ahead, and those who invested early are seeing the rewards. We are, as a planet spending more than ever before on consumer goods ... So perhaps there isn’t an apocalypse at all, but a rebalancing of a massively over leveraged real estate portfolio simply too big to serve today’s consumers. Perhaps town and city planners also share some of the burden, those quick to make a buck, and drive 'mom & pop' stores out of business in return for a shiny new mall didn't look at a longer term plan. Now we see 'Main Street' empty and that once bustling mall empty. What went wrong? We can't only blame the retailers for not looking ahead here.

Perhaps. As there always has been. There are some brands that failed to change, failed to offer something different, failed to protect themselves by continuing to listen. Perhaps as we see in some areas, where the town centre is starting to show greenshoots of revival, in todays mobile driven world, a sense of community, real physical community will be the driver.

reRoman amphora sellers don’t exist today because the market changed, but people still buy Olive Oil, just not as they did before.

Perhaps. Just perhaps. Its a wake up call to listen.