SHOPPING AS NONSTOP BALLET

   The heart of holiday shopping season arrived Black Friday yesterday.  Stores busy, shelves overflowing with products, advertising wherever you turn, even videos of shoppers run amok.  If you spend time in stores throughout the year as we do and see the activity through the eyes of a retail environment designer, you might marvel as the complexity and synchronicity of selling products at retail.

   Display companies are part choreographers, part set designers, part stagehands.  We set the tone, we manage the stage, we present the world of the store for the audience: shoppers.

   Increasingly, that dance occurs both in stores and the virtual stores of the Internet.  Probably 50% of American shoppers will have made a purchase online this past weekend.  Does this spell the death of retail stores?

  Of course not.  People still love the intimacy, immediacy and interactivity of the store.  Plus, many stores are doing an excellent job of catering to the wishes of omnichannel shoppers: people who wish to shop and buy whenever and wherever they choose.  That means using a tablet in the kitchen in the morning, a PC at the office midday, a smartphone on the street after work, ordering by phone in the evening or the wandering the aisles of Target, Toys’R’Us or your local mom-n-pop store on the weekend.

   Shoppers want to shop when they want to shop.  That’s why you had stores open 24 hours a day and now on Thanksgiving.  That’s why “blue laws” that once shuttered stores on Sundays exist few places today.  Consumers – and consuming – drive our economy and the decisions of retailers to meet shoppers wherever they are.  It’s a 24/7/364 dance of our own creation, America.  Don't look now but that 365^th day – Christmas – is now at risk, too.

AMERICAN MANUFACTURING 2013

   I had someone recently ask me what I see as the biggest stories in American manufacturing for 2013.  Four things sprang to mind:

   1.  OBAMACARE.  Anxiety among businesses large and small has been rampant since the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead in mid-2012.  Manufacturers have seen rapidly-rising health insurance costs as insurance providers girded their loins for this brave new world.  With health care a large and growing line item for most of us and our associates, ObamaCare has been a big story.

   2.  SHALE.  North America's oil & gas boom, driven by technological improvements, has entire industries rethinking how they operate.  Our energy assumptions are being reset - largely for the better.

   3.  AUTOMOTIVE.  This leaner sector still casts a long shadow through the supply chain.  The robust rebound to meet pent up demand has many manufacturers smiling.

   4.  RESHORING.  Though some industries will never return to N America, some at the margin are moving away from the rising labor and transportation costs in Asia and toward the shorter lead-times and greater flexibility of being closer to their markets.  The total cost of ownership (TCO) has swung more in our favor.

   In contrast to much of what has occurred over the past two decades, it's energizing to recognize that more of the big stories of this year are actually POSITIVE for N American manufacturing.

  What do YOU see as the Big Story for American manufacturing this year?   

E-COM WON'T KILL IN-STORE

   The U S Department of Commerce tracks online buying as closely as in-store buying.  Online grew 18.4% in the second quarter of 2013 over the same period in 2012.  Impressive.  But in gross volume, online remains pretty minor: $64.8 billion out of $1.126 trillion.  In other words, only 5.8% of all US retail sales occurred online.

   The growth trajectory of online over the past decade has been steady but it won’t end in-store retailing.  In fact, there are 1.1 million retailers in the US today; there were 1.027 million in 2003.  Online isn’t killing in-store; online is making in-store better as shoppers have better access to more information so they can make better purchase decisions.

   We are seeing the rise of the omnichannel shopper as people use more and better resources to research, find, comparison shop and purchase goods from diapers and detergent to diamonds and Dodges.  

   The retail environments industry remains strong because (a) people still like shopping in stores and (b) retailers compete more ferociously than ever to win business from savvy customers.  The strong get stronger while the weak cease to exist.  Just as with online resources, the best retailers make use of all of the tools at their disposal: in-store, online, catalog, advertising, couponing, promotion, sampling, etc.  Oh, and products their customers want to buy at prices they’re willing to pay.