Its Another New Year!

The Consumer Rolls On

Happy New Year everyone!

As I write this, most of my business friends and associates are headed off to the annual ritual called the National Retail Federation’s “Big Show.” If you’ve opened this expecting a recap, it’s probably best to close the page and move on. I don’t go anymore. Ever. I probably went to 35 or so in my career and finally, right before the pandemic, declared myself finished. I’d already been calling it the Bataan Death March for close to a decade. My knees hate it, my brain can’t absorb all the things I see and hear, and if I’m honest, it makes me feel claustrophobic. So, I am chilling and chilly in Miami.

But I don’t want to bury the lead. The lead is, after a difficult year, with sad tales to be told over the inebriate of your choice, I think I’m able to write again. I’ve been watching and listening…. adding in snippets here and there on LinkedIn (X and I are finished), but now I’m diving back into the blog.

So notwithstanding my absence from the Greatest Retail Show On Earth, here are what I think are going to be important in retail this year. And I’ll end with some of 2024’s personal high- and lowlights.

First, I have to say a few words about AI. I was asked in a retail blog today if I thought retail was “ready for AI.” My response was “have you even decided what you’d use AI for, besides machine learning in the supply chain?” Is AI ready for retail? My thought? NO. Not even close. It’s not clear if it’ll scale enough to do it right. I mean, you can pretend you’re Meta AI, and be purely keyword driven, have no concept of irony or context, but is that AI? Nope. It’s as old as a database of “bad words and phrases.” I’m certainly happy for those holding NVIDIA stock, but let’s get real here. It’s interesting for deep fake videos and not-so-deep paintings and photos. But do you really want to write your product descriptions using AI? Do you think it’s going to excite your customers? Pro tip: No. It’s probably not going to save you a lot of money or improve your energy footprint.

Second, item level RFID has made a serious comeback. There are still things I can’t wrap my head around in terms of booking the counts that you get out of RFID scans. For small box retailers, you can get full store coverage, but I was always taught that a count is only as good as your prep and cut-off….so I’m having a hard time understanding how any auditor can sign off on booking the counts. I’m hoping to have lunch with an RFID specialist (I don’t know what to call them, really) to help me understand how it would work. I would like to talk to an auditor once and for all on the subject as well. For finding a specific item in a sea of product in a big store, I get it. And to my mind, we haven’t even begun to calculate the savings if we could get out of the whole physical inventory process. I’ve lived it. It’s really, really expensive, and not as accurate as you’d like. So I’ve been all-in on that for 20 years, once reader prices got low enough.

Third, I guess I’ll have to talk about “products in prison” (as my colleague Neil Saunders calls them). Locking up your shaving cream behind plexiglass is a sure way for someone to order the same from Amazon. Maybe I’m just sitting in my ivory tower, but I haven’t seen a number backed by facts that indicate we should be doing this. I did see a number that said shoplifting had increased by 93%. My questions were simple: from what and how do you know, anyway? All you know is the product is gone. What’s really going on here?

Fourth (from the world of deep geekdom), I was shocked to learn from an advisory client that homegrown COBOL applications, along with 4^th Generation Languages old enough to vote are still running important functions all over the industry. I was kind of shocked. This client has a tool to reverse engineer these applications into something more extensible, living in the Cloud and actually maintainable. So simple advice for you: If you’re still running a homegrown app because it was quick to develop or because it was the only language scalable at the time, it’s time to change. Not next year. Now. There are only so many Bandaids you can put on an old wound. The tools exist to convert in a more stepwise way than they used to be. It’s not like the packages installed to get beyond Y2K (wait…that was 25 years ago…how could that be????). I seem to recall it took Nestle six years and four CIOs to finally complete that implementation. No one has that kind of time or money anymore. And no CIO wants to end their career that way. But that’s no excuse to hold the business back. Get on it. Really. Change is the only constant. Can your portfolio keep up?

Fifth, I’ll have to continue my observations on the customer experience. So far, I don’t see a ton of improvements. Pockets of it, for sure. But this also takes me back to AI and the bots and scripts that are used to answer customer questions. Oy!

I’ve just realized I’ve used far too many words to end with any kind of long recap of the past year. Short strokes, I lost some very dear friends, I went on a very problematic Ozempic adventure and spent way too much mindshare on deciding where to move, when in fact, I quite like my home. It’s time for a new era, and I’m finally ready!

So over the coming year, I’ll try and give you guys once-a-month updates on one of the five elements above. Have a great time in New York, if your planes get you there. Oh yeah, Rethink Retail was kind enough to declare me a top retail expert again this year. I even offered to defer to a younger, up-and-coming talent, but they decided to keep me around. So, there’s that! I guess at some point you become some kind of icon until you’re speaking in gibberish. Please let me know if I do that! I don’t want to bore you.

Cheers and make sure you rest those legs in NY.