Anyone looking for retail supply chain trends or where the retail supply chain goes would be amazed. And amazed in two ways: 1) the common places abound; 2) trends are always safe "things" that are already happening so that in the future they have little or nothing.
Author José Crespo de Carvalho | Reading time 4 minutes
It is common for all "opinion houses" to come across trends that say nothing new. Except for the puppets that present and put things at a sophisticated level of visualization. In the rest, I have not heard or read anything lately like some failed prophecies of a recent past, which I just name below as examples. Now look:
Some said that there was no reason why people wanted a computer at home and… reality shows otherwise. It was 40 years ago, that's right. Some have said that distance shopping would never be popular. Certainly, it was almost in the year I was born, 1966, but in any case the reality shows, once again, the opposite.
The man who created the Ethernet protocol prophesied an internet breakdown for 1996. Well, all said. I don't even know if the unnecessary 640k of RAM (which no one will need), a phrase attributed to Bill Gates, could contribute to a smile about what futurology is.
Anyway. I don't do futurology but I also say a few banalities about the future of retail. Two banalities that I will comment on. Perhaps more the two findings of what I saw and what I lived and live. Perhaps the reader does not feel exactly the same as I do when I read something about futurology: a smile is the least. But not much more.
So, here are the two banalities (it's always good to be in summer to be able to say banalities):
# 1 I don't believe in an almost all-digital world.
In 2001 I won an award for best international paper with writing that essentially prophesied the end of the first internet boom and focused on what was called the last mile. It predicted the failure of several business models and said that there was a succession of things without any foundation. It was said, believed, launched, and sponsored by the bank. I confess that this was the prize that cost me the most to receive in my life. And also the worst earned too. Why? Because it was easy to guess and because it was even easier for anyone who was, as I have always been, on the supply chain to say what I said and predict the bankruptcy of the models of the time. I know that 15 years ago I was still a young man and when they looked at me they thought I could only be kidding. But when I said it and wrote it, I did it much more with the feeling that the physical territory was being stolen from us than bouncing the digital world. Then, focus on the product. To draw attention to the tangible. And to continue, still, today, to stop much of what they tell me because there are half-truths and half-lies in all this: we are not going far without a PC, without a mobile phone, without a network full of physical devices, without steaks with chips. That's life. The physical world didn't end in the first big technological leap in the 2000s and it won't end like this. Or it won't end, period. Of this, I am almost certain although this finding may be annoying.
# 2 I believe we are better prepared for the digital revolution now than 15 years ago.
Hence believing that we will have a digital world without the physical world goes a long way. We can neither dress in the future (we will walk naked) - and we will not have tangible clothes, we will not even live in anything (we will sleep on the street) - and we will not have any house, we can neither have a car (we will walk or in shared transport) - nor even if we drive anything, we may not even enjoy the pleasure of a meal (there will certainly be subterfuges to eat well) - and we will not even need to feed. Everything is possible. But I swear we will at least miss the time when we had huge paraphernalia of tangible, physical utensils, products, and goods. And stocks, and paper books, and restaurants that give us real food, not just samples, and cars with which we made drifts, not just shared means of transportation, and houses where we had privacy, not condominiums or groups of people who come together to enjoy a joint or shared living proposal.
I'm done. I didn't say anything. Needless to say much because this is more of an editorial. But there is one question I would like to leave: Why did Amazon, with its digital sex appeal (but largely based on physical operation, albeit with great automation), buy Whole Foods? Suddenly, does the digital giant believe that the future can also pass through the healthiest grocery store, or do you think that in order to become healthier we will have to give up those good meals and trade them for tablets that will sell at Whole Foods and ship through Amazon? In any case, a conventional, physical retail chain. The future will say a lot. But I confess I don't like to anticipate it at all. Not only does it loses the joke, it eventually takes a good deal of pleasure out of life. We'll see.
