When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated.
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.
When I first started at HSN, I knew that retailers would have to be poised to take advantage of technology and the rapidly changing ways in which people shop. It was one of the things that drew me to the company.
Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.
Retailing has gone from an information-scarce to an information-rich environment.
The customer is always right! John Wanamaker must be turning in his grave. If you're a customer today, you're an intruder.
Retail is now totally propelled by consumers and their needs. People can buy what they want in any way that they want it. That trend started a long time ago, and it has really changed everything.
The 1970s crystallized the service mantra as we now know it.
The butcher, baker, and candlestick maker have been around a lot longer than supermarkets and Wal-Mart.
In the future, fast-fashion retailers might change their philosophy toward real efforts to create a world of their own. One can only hope.
It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
I think one of the big errors people are making right now is thinking that old-style businesses will be obsolete, when actually they will be an important part of this new civilization. Some retail groups are introducing e-commerce and think that the bricks are no longer useful. But they will continue to be important.
Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves.
More and more department stores are acting as the shop window for a range of retailers now, using space more efficiently to recreate the feel of the local market, creating new market opportunities for the small and the niche.
