Wait a minute. Wait a minute Doc, are you telling me you built a time machine out of a DeLorean? - The State of the Retail Apocalypse 2025 version.

2025 proved to us Retail was broken - not in the ways we care to talk about. We say we are customer first, but we are not. The customer has been on their knees for 2 years and we are bleeding them dry. The most successful retailers are making money, not from retailing but from logistics at scale and new media networks. These have created false economies, driving up costs for brands, increasing workloads and are largely accessible only to those who can deliver on network effects. This, will be my first view on 2025 - not all retailers should become marketplaces. But that’s for later. And what say for BNPL, the credit line we never knew we wanted or needed and the lifetime of pain it is going to inflict on us on the consumer side when fully regulated and integrated into modern debt society.?

I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it.

Retailers making money - Amazon, Walmart, Next and a scattering of others. They share common characteristics:?

• Logistics at scale - but earned over 15 + years.?
• Understanding inventory curation and composition.?
• Listening to customers and taking action - we all forget that second part.?
• Advertising networks. This is profitable beyond your wildest dreams.?

They have shown us the way forward in ecommerce for quite some time too, but without network impacts, what does that leave us with:

• Complicated ways to do marketing - attribution is still a conversation.?
• Next day shipping as standard - no consumer ever said they require this, all of the time - another false economy.?
• Standard design websites so we do not forget the burger menu is always on the left - let’s be honest, ecomm is transactional over experiential for the most part.?
• The fight for growth has left cost cutting beyond, as it will with Profitability - because for many it is just not there.

Marty McFly: "Sounds pretty heavy."

Dr. Emmett Brown: "Weight has nothing to do with it."

Retail supply chain is hard on our environment. That is a fact - the movement of product is not a simple thing. It is cumbersome and expensive. It requires the constant manufacturing of products in places we don’t know and are expecting somewhere along the supply chain, someone will make me feel better about my choices. Someone will use water caring chemicals, less dye and I will see the B Corp badge and sleep better on my Purple mattress knowing I did my bit today, after all, as consumers, this is all we can do. Retail needs consumerism at its purest - sustainability left the room, a long time ago.?

Calvin? Why do you keep calling me Calvin?

When was the last time you were excited about a product. 2024 came and went without so much as a new sized Air Fryer to sing and shout about ( I know they did) but when did we last capture our own attention with something that was going to be a good holiday release? Those days have passed us by. We do not seek them any more and brands are not delivering. Maybe we have everything we already need? Imagine trying to ponder that - maybe Brad Pitt in Fight Club was right - sorry, Tyler Durden. What do we really, actually need these days. It is hard to figure out from all of the time we spend on our phones. Thumb stop being a measure we use to test effectiveness. Oh boy.?

We have become a passive species, being fed everything and not needing to lift our heads, save only to breathe or yawn (they are connected) and otherwise we wait, like the Dodo, who forgot to fly, to start regressing in ways we cannot yet see. We need to be active in our own need state to really give accurate insights about ourselves.?

Since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?

Govts and retailers need consumerism. There is too much global GDP riding on it, too many jobs. These jobs span the entire skills capabilities of populations too. From manual labor and learning to actual rocket scientists in BA roles. It is a place where we provide social outlets or a former Third Space for people to occupy in their lives. Malls with live inventory checking, crowd measurement and and increased push to capture alot of inane, non useful data, has made the experiences, well, even more dull.?

Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads..

AI - hard to write about the world of retail and not talk about AI. Learning models have been in retail for some time now. And we have not evolved them to much great advantage. We now find ourselves in a different place in a different time with a brand new set of considerations. Large platforms now have as much power over us as they want. We willingly submit data to them without cause or care of how it is being used. The phone has been a unique way to understand an individual for almost 15 years. This data point was pivotal. Banks and payments are looking into another new future - away from the reliance on phones. Transaction volumes continue to grow and outlets for their use are growing (thanks Retail Media) - The banks will no longer require to carry wallets or phones but use our face as the payment method. Don’t believe me? Get over the JP Morgan stand during #NRF and listen - they are going big on it and AI.?

Facial recognition for banking - commonplace but not a unique identifier.?

Marty, you're beginning to sound just like my mother.

Cotd - #AI is drastically changing the future fortunes for how ecommerce can be delivered, scaled and operated. It is likely that CoPilot, Sidekick and others not yet born will use logic and rules to run our mini empires. This is not too far in the distant future. From this type of delivery, we will see profits emerge and a new way to “do ecommerce”. Your job, should you choose to accept it will be to feed it the rules of engagement, sit back, relax and reap the benefits.?

I've never seen purple underwear before.

We will understand what personalization at scale can deliver - individual search, discovery or creation labs where you can design your own trainers, sorry, wait, what? This is old news. This, remember is Back to the Future. But waiting in the wings, when we lift our heads from our phones and think about the lifestyle we want to participate in, will personalization at scale make it possible for brands to not be trend followers but trend creators. The creator economy itself will get stronger.?

Your Uncle Joey didn't make parole again.

The jobs we have been clinging too simply will not be there in many parts of our ecosystem. They are already fragile and any movement by Finklestein or Lutke could end jobs, investments and a lot of averagely built technology overnight. Average won’t cut it any more - it shouldn’t. Those with good developers will utilize learning models and how to use them within well designed retail/technology architectures. Today you can build a SaaS company without any staff. This is possible today. I think agencies need to be product first in the future and service second, the product gets the money in the door and then the talent knows what to do with it. Big agencies will win big. There will be many job losses and roles made extinct never to darken our doors again.?

I finally invented something that works!

The market size will grow but those growing it will get exponentially bigger. It is already happening. Mergers and Acquisitions are now as common as Steven Speilberg hits. In all industries. Exits have not been happening in enough volume coming from Retail and eCommerce. The returns not there and the risks too great - even though we keep pushing the door. Chapter 11 last year was the headline that kept on giving. So what of the landscape this year. Investment has been heavy into AI - Mergers in retail blocked by soon to be “Open to Work” Lina Khan, so what chance does Retail have against behemoths who just won’t go away? Money will continue to dry up in non fertile SaaS banks and days of agency party will be numbered.?

No wonder your president has to be an actor. He's gotta look good on television.

What can save us from all of this? Not much being honest. But regulation is continually trying to muscle in as it finds itself between many rocks and hard places all at once. Regulation with discussion is useless to us, but is going to happen. We need to accept this. This may be our entry point out of the passive role we now play in our own world. Thinking about the impacts of regulation should be part of social discussion and more than at any point in my life, over the Christmas holiday, I was asked about my views on aspects of my work, like never before. So maybe there is a glimmer of hope out there somewhere, but we will be reliant on governments to show us our blind spots. Or those voices that get muted so often, but we need to hear more from them. For GDPR reasons, I cannot name them here.?

Lorraine. My density has brought me to you.

As the quote reads, I am not smart enough to have the answers, But I do want to raise the discussion. We have our heads in the when it comes to these topics and we owe it to ourselves to figure out a new way through it - there are Smart brands emerging all of the time, all over the world that spot arbitrage and opportunity and use these levers to change how the world operates for them. But they, do things differently - they do because the old way doesn’t work and there lies our case for hope.?

If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit.

A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for. - Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.

we’ve been redefining what it means to be human. Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special? In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.”

― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

See you at #NRF