Online shopping has now reached a decade of maturity. We all use services like Amazon Subscribe & Save—and we do so through our phones, following advertisements we see on Facebook.
Yet while the internet forever changed shopping, the physical retail environment lagged behind. That is until recently. In 2016, we saw some of the first hints of how traditional stores are about to change, too: an Amazon storethat lets you grab whatever you like without paying for it, e-commerce companies open physical locations, and high fashion taking inspiration from your local chain drugstore self-checkout. And over the next few years, the brick-and-mortar buying experience will change even more dramatically.
We talked to experts in retail, ranging from the analyst to the scientist to the marketer, about the big retail trends around the corner. Stores aren’t going anywhere any time soon. But they are about to look and feel a whole lot different from the way they did before. Here are the big retail trends to look out for in 2017 and beyond.
Millennials are moving to cities, and they’re not buying cars. “We have an entire industry around suburban big-box grocery stores,” says Aidan Tracey, CEO at product branding collective sgsco. “Loading a case of water and diapers on your back and getting on the bus isn’t going to work.”
They might look begin to look more like a warehouse with a tiny retail storefront that would be car- or Uber-pickup friendly, while the big-box store companies open more small satellites stores with less inventory.
“We had been operating for this idea that bigger is better, the superstore or supercenter. Now we’re seeing a shift away from that, brands closing their stores, reconsidering their footprint,” says Sidney Morgan-Petro, retail editor at the trend forecasting agency WGSN.
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