I grew up in the outlying suburbs of New York City in the 1960s and ’70s. Like other middle-class kids from the area, I spent many a weekend being dragged around by my mother to go shopping at stores like Abraham & Strauss, Caldor, and Bamberger’s.

On family road trips we often stopped at Howard Johnson’s for lunch or a snack.

As I got older, Lord & Taylor became my go-to place to buy my grandmother a birthday gift or Christmas present.

In college, my favorite places to buy albums (whether vinyl or 8-track) were Tower Records and Sam Goody.

After I got my MBA, I worked for a large global consulting firm and frequently lugged around a 22-pound Compaq computer on more plane trips than I care to mention.

Our firm’s client reports were produced by an in-house graphics department that used a dedicated machine to take text from a Wang word processing workstation (that could only be operated by a trained administrative assistant) and Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets (printed out on a dot matrix printer) to turn them into good-looking hard-copy reports and “transparencies.”

My first house was outfitted with furniture my then-wife and I had purchased from Marshall Field’s and Carson Pirie Scott & Co.—two iconic Chicago department stores founded in 1852 and 1854, respectively.

For years, our bookcases were chockablock with a truly frightening number of CDs and VHS tapes.

As our young daughters grew older, a typical Friday night might include a trip to Blockbuster to rent a movie. Or maybe one of my kids would occupy herself playing a Game Boy.

Our first home computer came from Gateway. We accessed the internet by inserting an AOL floppy disk and connecting to the internet via a dial-up modem.

When I joined the senior leadership team at Neiman Marcus in 2004, much of my life seemed centered on my shiny new Palm Pilot. My colleagues were similarly glued to their devices—but, for whatever reason, theirs were primarily BlackBerrys.

At this point you can probably surmise where I’m headed with this.

As I recount in my new book Leaders Leap: Transforming Your Company at the Speed of Disruption—and as most of us of a certain age might well recall, products, technologies, and brands that were once hugely popular in the not-too-distant past are now completely gone or mere shells of their former dominant selves.

Nowhere is this more evident than in retail.

If we set the Wayback Machine for 1995 and consider what shopping for just about anything was like toward the end of the last century, when the internet, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist.

Think about it: Something like 98% of all retail activity involved going to a physical location to see what the store had on offer, maybe getting some sales help, toting your selected merchandise to a cash register, paying for it, and carting it home with you.

Whether the shop you visited had what you wanted at all, or had it in your desired size or color, was a bit of a gamble and there was little to no information on product quality or the best price to pay.

Then this all began to change. Slowly at first. But then faster and faster.

Within a few years, much of what we called retail or shopping was completely transformed.

Let’s briefly recap some of the most profound shifts that have reshaped the competitive landscape.

ACCESSIBILITY shifted from being limited by store hours and the number of retailers you were willing to invest the time (and the fuel cost) to visit to a nearly infinite array of options, available virtually anywhere, at any time, in any way.

PRODUCT CHOICE was no longer limited to what would fit on the shelves of the stores situated in your town—instead, it became a nearly endless aisle of abundance.

INFORMATION about product quality, features and ben- efits, and in-stock availability all became fast and easy to acquire.

PRICE, once largely a take-it-or-leave-it proposition that the vendor decided upon, became less of a given as pricing and promotional data became available through dedicated websites or browser extensions. Increased competition also generally led to a lowering of prices on many items, upending the underlying economics of many business models.

CONVENIENCE has gotten fundamentally redefined. As e-commerce grew the number and variety of products that could be directly delivered to one’s home or office expanded dramatically. And products that were typically delivered saw their net prices and delivery times shrink. Fast and easy returns and convenience features like buy online and pickup in store became commonplace.

A profound shift in CONNECTION became massively important to the buying experience. Before an era of unrelenting digital disruption, our connections were largely confined to family, friends, coworkers, and maybe a house of worship or club to which we belonged. Today, depending upon how active we are on social media, we may well have many thousands of friends or followers, most of whom we can communicate with instantaneously. Social media influencers are increasingly important to the success of many retail brands.

Entirely new business models have harnessed these shifts to reshape most sub-sectors of retail. Amazon is the most obvious example, but so-called digitally native brands like Warby Parker have leveraged these shifts to great effect. The elimination of friction and the ability to marry supply and demand has been central to the emergence of marketplace models like eBay and Etsy, as well as much of the entire resale or circular economy model powered by companies like Poshmark and ThredUp.

And there is no end in sight, particularly as a wave of wave of disruption is being ignited by the rapid evolution and deployment of generative AI and LLM’s.

In fact, if anything the pace of disruption is only accelerating and to quote jazz legend Miles Davis: “If you aren’t nervous, you aren’t paying attention.”

I know that I probably write and speak about the decline of US department stores too much, but it is a familiar and easy-to-understand example and one that shows the harsh impact of failure to address profound shifts.

While it’s easy to blame Amazon, or e-commerce more broadly, for department store woes, let’s remember a few things. Department stores began losing market share well before Amazon had a competitive offering. And of course nothing has ever prevented Macy’s, JC Penney, Kohls, or any other department store in the US or around the world from having a compelling online presence.

As it turns out, having mostly a bunch of quite average stuff that I have to invest a lot of time to go see and sort through is no longer so interesting with the explosion of off-line and online alternatives. When I can access apparel and home products at a great price much more conveniently (think TJ Maxx  as just one example), why do I need to go elsewhere? When Ulta and Sephora deliver a more focused offering close to the other stores I travel to more frequently, why would I make a special trip to the mall only to be harassed by aggressive salespeople? When dozens of specialty stores have emerged to better meet my wants and needs, why would I put up with the sea of sameness and lack of services that epitomizes the anchor stores of many malls.

The penalty for sleepwalking through the revolution—for merely watching shifts happen–has been huge. The retail market share that department stores command has dropped from about 5% in 2000, to well under 1% today.  The stock market value of the top four North American department stores combined is now less than Ulta’s, a specialty store that only participates in categories that represent about 10% of a typical department store mix.   Off-price retailer TJX  has gone from a small player at the turn of the century, to  far, far greater sales and stock market valuation than all of the iconic department stores.

But frankly when it comes to the speed of disruption, things have been rather slow in the realm of brick-and-mortar dominant retail.  The decline of department stores, book stores, video rental shops, or certain so-called category killers like Bed, Bath & Beyond and Toys R Us has been like watching a slow motion car crash.

But the speed of disruption is becoming breathtakingly fast in many corners of the world, retail or otherwise.

In barely more than a couple of years, Direct from Factory players like Shein and Temu have gone from non-entities to disruptors that are very likely to soon rank in the top ten of all global retailers in terms of GMV. Retail Media Networks, which until recently barely anyone besides Amazon was focused on, are fast becoming major profit contributors for several major retailers. GenAI, which virtually nobody outside of academia and esoteric start-ups was talking about two summers ago will soon have massive impact on most parts of retail.

When it comes to understanding the speed of disruption, your mileage may vary, but I reckon you are likely to experience more disruption in the next three years, then you have in the past ten. I’d plan–no I’d act–accordingly.

If the past is any indicator of the future (spoiler alert: it most certainly is), it’s hard to know—or sometimes even imagine–where things are headed with any level of precision. As a wise person once said: “it is difficult to make predictions. Particularly about the future.”

Today, our world looks radically different than it did when e-commerce first emerged, when smart devices started to transform how we communicate, and when operating in the cloud began moving toward ubiquity.

Shift happens. And it’s happening faster and faster all the time.

Shift happens. Get used to it.

Shift happens. Shake hands with the new weird.

Shift happens. Don’t let it destroy your future.

Shift happens. Summon up all the courage you require.

Shift happens. Get ready to leap.

 

This post is adapted from material in Leaders Leap. We expanded on it in a special episode of the Remarkable Retail podcast earlier this year.