Store Of The Future 2020: How To Drive Footfall During And Post Covid 19 Release date: August 17th, 2020 (87 pages) PDF/Powerpoint format. Price: GBP1,034.00 PDF brochure Buy

Abstract

Covid-19 has changed everything and it is fair to say that the tech industry has stepped up to the plate by and large, when it comes to retail. On the other hand a lot of the solutions described in this report have been around for some time - and now represent old wine in new bottles. In our view the only real novelty and real innovation remains Amazon Go and its just walk out technology. That said, now many of the solutions are appearing in a new light due to changed circumstances brought upon by the outbreak of Covid-19. Whereas, for example, a self check out solution with computer vision capabilities to add up the prices in real time was mainly about eliminating costs, associated with manual check out staff and improving flow throughput, it is now all about hygiene issues and avoiding human contact, touchpoints and eliminating queues. In other words we have seen a big pivot not so much in the solutions themselves, but in the marketing around their use cases and capabilities.
Nevertheless, every decade new revolutionary retail concepts emerge (the Apple store turned electronics retailing upside down) and we think Peloton is one of these players. Like Apple, Peloton’s strategy is helped by selling its own product, the retailer has managed to combine social media, gaming and fitness with a subscription model and a significant draw for shoppers to visit their locations.
Obviously, tracking what Peloton does or how a running shoe retailer overcomes the crisis will have limited usefulness for other sectors at first sight, but there are elements that can be incorporated into other business models - especially around social media communication, online communities, engagement and the like.
Other currently successful retail case examples heavily involve online in some shape or form, be it the various (unmanned) click & collect stations, automated stores, lockers and vending machines or retailers using Zoom type offerings to sell to shoppers at home. The zero inventory stores are an inversion of this concept and should work well with clothes (especially when changing room use is heavily restricted).
Even now there are techniques how retailers can drive footfall to their stores, many of them involving tech, but not all of them. Much of the secret lies in retailers utilising their store locations in a much better way to regain authenticity and localize their stores. And we don’t mean building MFCs adjacent to their stores (even though that might be a good solution for some retailers).
In any case, coupled with the shift to online, the lockdown and the subsequent easing of it has revealed that a lot of physical retail is in a precarious state. So what will happen next? We don’t believe it’s contentious to predict that we are looking at a global recession to come. The likely recession impact will see many businesses going to the wall and unemployment rising fast, so we expect a channel shift to the discounters (Aldi and Lidl will win again). There will be huge distress on the high street, with retail bankruptcies forcing change on the property sector and rents and rate regimes (spreading upstream to pension funds as property investors and PE and so on). For all surviving retailers a huge speeding up of digitalisation trends is ongoing.
We believe that new tech enabled generation of stores will replace the old model battered by online and Covid-19. Finally, tech alone will not get retailers through the crisis, but it will play a crucial part towards finding a solution or many partial solutions that combined enable something akin to a return to a pre-Covid normality.

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