“The future of retail is small, efficient, omni stores” that are located “where the customer tells us,” says Abercrombie $ Fitch CEO Fran Horowitz. She notes that stores don’t get the same traffic as they did before online shopping, “so you have to provide a location that is financially sound, which has X amount of traffic and X amount of digital orders that come together.”
Other retail CEOs predict that the next five years will bring more entertainment to the shopping experience, such as themes and multisensory physical experiences, and that stores will increasingly become places for community and social interaction.
“The role of the store needs to be much more experiential than it is today,” Levi Strauss CEO Michelle Gass says. “I think consumers are going to raise the bar, and they’re just going to expect that because when you can just shop and do a transaction a click away, there has to be a higher purpose for a store.”
Marc Lore, former CEO of Walmart U.S. e-commerce and founder of Jet.com, expects a move toward conversational commerce, “where people can use voice or text to have a conversation with a digital assistant that knows you as well as your best friend.”
