NRF 2019: Three Vibrant Themes from Tenser’s Take on BrainTrust LIVE!

NRF 2019

LIVE FROM NRF 2019: My BrainTrust LIVE! report from the Big Show in New York, Jan. 14 2019.

Tenser’s Tirades reports from the crossroads of the Big Show floor as hundreds of attendees flow past. This year’s event boasted 37,000 registered attendees, 900 members of the media and more than 120 keynote, breakout, and vendor-sponsored educational sessions.

BrainTrust LIVE! January 14, 2019 – With James Tenser

Topic: Our BrainTrust panelist, James Tenser, reports in from the floor of NRF’s Big Show and boils things down into three areas of innovation he’s seeing as most prevalent at the show. [13 minutes][Posted by RetailWire on Monday, January 14, 2019]

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Flying or Dying: Whose View of Stores Rings True for The Future?

Shoptalk: Flyin or Dyin

FOR THE 3,100 retail, tech and finance movers and shakers who gathered here in Las Vegas at the inaugural Shoptalk conference this week, an existential question still remains unresolved: Are stores poised to soar in the digital stratosphere or are they circling the digital drain?

“Stores are incredibly challenged,” said Ron Johnson, CEO of Enjoy, the online services startup he founded this year following his stunning success with the Apple Stores and his shocking disappointment at JCPenney.

“Over the past 20 years stores have been in a relative decline” he added, referencing the faster growth posted by Amazon.com and other pure-plays and the recent reports of soft quarterly earnings and closings from brick & mortar giants like Kohl’s and Macy’s.

But Jerry Storch, CEO of Canada’s Hudson’s Bay Company, which operates Saks 5th Avenue, Lord & Taylor, the Gilt online boutique site, and Germany’s Galeria Kaufof as well as its eponymous stores north of the border, would beg to differ.

“That narrative is all wrong,” he told a packed Shoptalk audience. “90.2% of sales are still in stores. Amazon still only controls 1.5% of U.S. retail sales.”

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Rise of the Retail Robots

rise of the retail robots

FRUSTRATED WITH STORE EMPLOYEES? Maybe a mechanical clerk is the answer.

The retail industry today is making some fascinating, promising, and perhaps troubling moves toward the routine use of autonomous retail robots in human environments. The efforts seem energized by technical advances, affordability gains, and increasing wages for their human counterparts.

“Everybody is beginning to talk about robotics as a way to remove labor from the system,” said David Marcotte, a senior vice president with consulting firm Kantar Retail, a friend of this blog, in an interview in the Star Tribune newspaper.

As a confirmed sci-fi geek (occasionally prone to paranoid fantasy), I’m both fascinated and a bit leery about this development. There’s little doubt, however, that the robots are coming to retail from numerous directions.

Tenser’s Three Laws of Retail Robotics:

1 – A retail robot may not harm, mislead or impede a shopper, or, through inaction, allow a shopper to fail to complete a sale or have an otherwise poor experience.

2 – A retail robot must faithfully implement the merchandising plans given it by retailers except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3 – A retail robot must encourage and protect the sale, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

(Adapted with great reverence from i Robot, by Isaac Asimov.)

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