Meet Michael

We are swamped with narratives these days.  It is how we try to make sense of an ever more complex world.

Retail is no different.  We are treated to constant proclamations of a “new normal.”  We are told of a “retail apocalypse.”  We are barraged with messages of online shopping’s inexorable rise and brick-and-mortar’s inevitable decline.  We read that Millennials think this way, Gen Z’ers shop that way.  We are regularly drawn in by the latest venture capital/investor-fueled hype.  Drone delivery!  15-minute grocery delivery!  The metaverse!

These narratives take hold and soon ossify, to the point that the actual evidence does not matter anymore — if it ever did in the first place.  Indeed, the thing about retail is that everyone does it: everyone has personal experiences and small (often unrepresentative) sample sizes that they can point to — not to mention subjectivities and aspirations that they are informed by, if even subconsciously.

For someone who lives and breathes this stuff every day, it can be frustrating.  Even worse, it has real-life, often self-fulfilling consequences, affecting stock prices, investment decisions, public policy and much else.

Such narratives are often incredibly simplistic, if not plain wrong.  But even when they do effectively capture something, they tend to assume that the future will simply be a straight-line extrapolation of the present.

If only it were that simple.  The reality is that retail will take many unforeseen turns in the years ahead.  It will zig and it will zag.  There will be second-order effects, then third-order ones.

When Amazon was devastating traditional bookselling in the 2000’s, how many people would have predicted that the 2010’s would turn out to be the decade of the independent bookshop, that Amazon would launch and then abort its own chain of brick-and-mortar bookstores, that Barnes & Noble would start expanding once again?

The goal of my speaking and writing is to dig into these narratives, to understand what they get right and analyze where they fall short — in other words, to detect the signal from the noise.

At the same time, I draw on my understanding and experience to delineate where today’s actual trends and trajectories might actually go, how they might deviate and what would cause them to do so, and perhaps more importantly, how the listener or reader can prepare for and indeed take advantage of such possibilities.

It will be attention-grabbing, it will be eye-opening, it will be thought-provoking.  You won’t look at retail quite the same way again.