“Customers will not pay literally a penny more than the true value of the product” — Ron Johnson, former senior vice president, Apple Retail, and J. C. Penney’s new CEO
Profit margins of Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Home Depot and Apple over the past decade.
While some may view the wholesale destruction of numerous brick-and-mortar segments as inevitable, we all have a vested interest in seeing the retail industry reboot itself for the modern age. Because as Main Street goes, so does America.
This is no mere platitude when you consider that 13.3 percent of all jobs in the U.S. are in retail (that’s 14.7 million jobs in all, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), and retail is deeply tied to consumer spending, the same spending bracket that accounts for two-thirds of the U.S. economy. This doesn’t even factor in the natural synergy between our domestic manufacturing base and Main Street retail as a sales channel for that base.
Read the full piece at GigaOM, and let me know what you think.
UPDATE: There's a nice write up in the San Francisco Chronicle on The Candy Store, one of the mini in-store boutiques that Target is featuring as part of their store-within-a-store strategy. I really like these guys. Great products, and nice operators.
Related:
- Assessing the Internet: Great Creator or Better Destroyer? (GigaOM)
- The Great Reset: Why Tomorrow May Not be Better than Today (O'Reilly)
- Pattern Recognition: Makers, Marketplaces and the Library of the Commons
- Apple's Segmentation Strategy, and the Folly of Conventional Wisdom (O'Reilly)
