The Great Shopping Debate

This topic is emerging as one of the biggest themes in Business Studies at the moment. Earlier this week Jim drew attention to Robert Peston’s new BBC series. Here are some other links:

I was on this topic as recently last April, wondering about the future of store browsing. If you go back to that blog you’ll see that I’ve put in lots of other links that will lead you to stories about the (possible) future of retail. My latest link was an article in the Economist; The emporium strikes back. It mounts a defence of conventional retailing and covers points like:

Shopping is about entertainment as well as just getting stuff. It allows people to build desires as well as fulfil them—if it did not, no one would ever window-shop. While computer screens can bewitch the eye, a good shop has more senses to reach out to. No one makes the point better than Apple; in terms of sales per unit area its showrooms-slash-playrooms best all other American retailers.

Shops make money. Bricks-and-mortar retail may be losing ground to online shopping, but it remains more profitable. Current pressure on retailers is painful, but the survivors may make shopping more satisfying and possibly even more profitable experience, both offline and on.

Many brands still think shops are the best way to attract customers. The Zara fashion brand, opened 482 stores in 2012, bringing its total to 6,009 in 86 countries. Primark, a fast-growing vendor of nearly disposable clothing, sells nothing on its website, relying on its 242 shops for almost all its sales. The same can hold at the luxury end, too—few will buy a $10,000 necklace online, or entrust it to the post. Space on the snazziest streets in London, Paris and New York is in such demand that luxury retailers pay millions in “key money” to secure it.

Now that the initial shock of the online onslaught has worn off, most big retailers have joined it. They proclaim themselves to be “omnichannel” merchants, as adept as Amazon online but with the added excitement and convenience that comes with physical shops.The chief executive of Tesco says that app development will come to be as important to his company as property development.

There’s stacks more in the article, which is well worth a look.