Once Again, There is No Such Thing As a ‘New Normal’ In Retail

Published On: September 1, 2022By Categories: Short Read

Whenever someone speaks of a “NEW NORMAL” in retail, be very skeptical. Retail has always been that most unpredictable of land uses: it zigs and zags, backtracks and reverses, veers off in random directions, often arriving at a place that few could have foreseen. Take bookselling, for instance. Back in the days of You’ve Got Mail and the supposed impregnability of the superstore, few saw Amazon on the horizon. Then, amidst the dominance of Amazon, no one was predicting the doubling of independent bookstores in the 2010’s, nor that Amazon would launch its own chain of physical bookshops in the middle of the decade, nor that it would ultimately shutter that chain amidst lackluster results, all while mom-and-pops continued to increase in number and Barnes & Noble started to show signs of life again by adopting the local, community-driven model. Indeed, the NYT article below notes that there are now some 2,023 indie booksellers with 2,561 stores in the U.S., up from 1,689 in July 2020, and that 200+ additional ones are expected in the next 1-2 years. It also reports that 70% of surveyed owners saw higher sales in 2021 versus 2019. How could that be, you ask? Well, my theory has long been that Amazon’s initial rout of the category’s major players – the liquidation of Borders, the contraction of Barnes & Noble – created a market vacuum which small-scale entrepreneurs proceeded to fill. And while the majority of purchases today still happen online, the number of consumers wanting the OG in-store experience remains more than enough to sustain a meaningful brick-and-mortar footprint, especially (though not exclusively) in highly-educated urban submarkets. Which gets me to wondering: might this sort of second-order effect speak to opportunities in other retail categories where e-commerce has amassed significant market share?

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