Retail Disruption Quotes

Walmart's period of explosive growth coincided with decades of wage stagnation and deindustrialization. By applying relentless downward pressure on prices and wages, the company came to dominate both consumer spending and employment in small towns and rural areas across the middle of the country.

The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble.

When I first went to Kmart, I was so excited that I could bring my kind of taste to the masses. They didn't have 100 percent cotton sheets at mass market in 1987. We made those in yellow and pink and pale blue.

Shopping in the future can become an experience where conventional retailers can complement the success of online retailing. Government needs to work in partnership with the sector to help make this a reality.

I want to put H&M and Zara out of business.

Look at the world of books nowadays. People just download books. They don't go to a bookstore. Amazon is wiping out Borders and Barnes and Noble. Those are brilliant examples of ephemeralization doing more with less at a better price.

When I started half.com, our three biggest competitors were Borders, Tower Records and Blockbuster Video.

I don't think we yet know - because it's probably not big enough - what exactly Amazon does to our cities, but whatever it is, I don't anticipate retail wastelands. If anything, it's maybe a wake-up call to retailers that they just have to offer something meaningful to customers.

I believe that all brands will become storytellers, editors and publishers, all stores will become magazines, and all media companies will become stores. There will be too many of all of them. The strongest ones, the ones who offer the best customer experience, will survive.

I've never known of Wal-Mart to be a good neighbor in any town it's ever moved into.

Disruption is in my genes. My father owned one of the first discount toy stores, Duane's Toyland, in Albany and Schenectady, near where I grew up. Discount was always a huge disruptor - it disrupted Sears Roebuck.

I tried to put direct to consumer through a wholesales channel - the industry was just not ready to adapt and change. The other issue I had was with Jimmy Choo.

Amazon didn't create any jobs. Amazon probably destroyed a million jobs in our economy.

Amazon and Snap both have stories that are compelling for many investors: Amazon has transformed retailing and is destined to dominate it. Snap is reinventing communication, at least for millennials and those even younger.

Retail is undergoing a massive change, and there is a chance for new leaders to emerge and older brands to reinvent themselves.

I wanted to create a new way of looking at retail.

I'd like to put together a think tank of people - economists, futurists, city planners, a few department-store people - to discuss reinventing the department store.

With the way Amazon and eBay had become big companies and with the way people were embracing technology, I was like, it is so obvious that this is going to be a huge game changer in this space. The combination of these things is going to change what it means to retail, what it means to launch brands, what it means to connect with your consumer.

We have to do commerce differently because the WalMart system of big box chain retail will soon die. This means rebuilding local main street economies (networks of local economic interdependency).