The Last Futurist presents its 2020 retail trends

- By Nuadox Crew -

The Last Futurist today compiled a list of thirteen retail trends for 2020.

Here are a few excerpts:

Smart stores

“Between Alibaba’s New Retail movement and Amazon’s AmazonGo stores, the future of the physical store is getting a lot more data orientated with new customer experiences embedded with the potential.

Cashier-less stories will become more common. Omnichannel retail will get smarter in a 5G world and younger shoppers will prefer NOT to be served by humans.

Smart stores of various sizes will leverage customer experiences that are more convenient, intuitive and minimalistic. This includes even pop-up stores.”

The “retail apocalypse” will accelerate

“Stores closures a myth? I think not. Store closures in 2019 exceeded 9,000 in the U.S., far surpassing openings, according to Coresight Research. What does 2020 hold? It’s really simple: more store closures.

America is still over-saturated with retail space. With rising rents and disappearing foot traffic, that’s a triple threat for physical retail and related business segments.

As consumer habits evolve, companies are searching for ways to evolve their stores to best serve customers’ needs. But that’s not always enough. For every rise of a Stitch Fix, there’s the demise of about 20 store chain brands. Innovation favors the consumer behavior.”

Walmart is betting on robotics

“Walmart is piloting a number of promising robots that could change the face of the retail store. We have to consider robots are likely good for investors and bad for employees. Floor scrubbing, shelf scanning, E-commerce warehouse automating and AI supervising – all the usual suspects are going to scale robotics at Walmart. This means retail will never be the same with China’s New Retail and the projects Walmart and Amazon are doing in the West. The gradual replacing of cashiers and sales associates from retail sounds unthinkable until it’s inevitable.”

> Read the entire article at The Last Futurist

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