Serious and Sometimes Comic Musings on the Future of Retail
Every retailer is going contactless, but what the different interpretations of this word can mean for the safety of both employees and customers is not something to take lightly.
A pickup only store not only prepares for the worst, but it also helps a retailer’s employees sleep better, its customers breathe easier, and its executives experiment for the future better than many other solutions out there right now.
The coronavirus has already pushed retail quickly into new and more impersonal directions, but there are still far more and far bigger dominoes to fall, writes Store of the Future expert and Forbes Senior Contributor Chris Walton.
Walmart is right to focus its efforts on grocery, but make no mistake, grocery is just a bilge pump. To survive in the long-run against Amazon, Walmart needs to go back to its roots and spur more innovative ideas.
What Brandless zealots, its celebrity investors, and SoftBank especially missed is that every new direct-to-consumer “brand” always ends up, if successful, as one of three distinctly different ideas.
A new location for Macy’s tech office is just a cost savings scapegoat and a pyrrhic victory for Wall Street. If the work, the vision, and the strategy aren’t there, that is the real problem, not the location of the office, writes Forbes Contributor Chris Walton.
Similar to the armed peasants pawns in chess are meant to represent, Amazon’s pop-ups are nothing fancy, but over time they could become a slow, tactical play to eat away at the remaining scraps upon which mall-based retail still feeds.
High production values and the use of the less expensive Bill from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in Walmart’s Super Bowl ad notwithstanding, order pickup is not a new idea and could be a signal that Walmart is vulnerable to other more important trends in the years ahead.
The Starbucks Pickup Only store in NYC looks like a Starbucks, walks like a Starbucks, even quacks like a Starbucks, but there is one big difference — customers place their orders from their mobile phones.
Chris shares his five most important criteria to consider when hiring retail employees for long-term success.
Contributor Chris Walton serves up his awards for the highlights and lowlights of one of the best retail years in recent memory — 2019, the year retail fought back.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillion’s decision to bet on supercenters highlights his keen understanding of where Walmart’s business is today, against where the industry is headed for the future.
Chris Walton gives his candid opinion of what to expect in 2020, including what CEOs could be on the chopping block, how Amazon will shock the world, what trends are here to stay vs. just impostors, and what company’s new CEO may already be making some really big mistakes.
A comprehensive review of Macy’s CEO Jeff Gennette’s stated strategies for the past two years shows that they do not have a hope and a prayer of solving what plagues Macy’s.
An an interview with Shoptalk’s Chief Global Content Officer, Forbes Contributor Chris and Anne learn why now was the exact right time for Shoptalk to put the entire retail industry on notice with its announcement that 100% of its 2020 speaker lineup will be women.
Omni Talk is the retail blog for retailers, written by retailers. Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga founded Omni Talk in 2017 and have quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in retail. Know More →
