Member-only story
Inevitable Evolution: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Retail Forever
Shelter in place, the rise of e-commerce, and how it forced an entire industry to adapt for the better
It’s the fall of 2017 in a crowded conference room in Palm Desert, California. I am sitting at a table with a handful of my new work colleagues for a job that I was about to start. I was hired right before the annual company meeting, which meant that I got to experience this before actually working a day at the job. As I was nervously getting to know my new teammates the hall went dark and silent, and that is when there were several speeches and keynotes designed to motivate and impress us.
I had been hired by a third-party marketing company (3PL for short) to represent a client in the retail space. The client that I would be representing was Google and the retail space was Best Buy. Most of the speeches given throughout this trip were relatively unremarkable, but one sticks out to me even four years later. A decision-maker on this program got up to the stage and proclaimed “They told us that retail was dead”. This speaker went on to talk about how 80% of people still make a majority of their purchases from traditional brick and mortar stores, and that this program believes in the old way of doing retail.
