Six days at the Big Show, kept with their original dates.
From the earlier library. In January 2021, with the Big Show held online for the first time, we published a diary every day with a rating for each session. In February 2023, back in New York, we wrote up the themes we brought home. The six diaries ran to about twelve thousand words. This is the part worth keeping.
NRF's Big Show is normally a week of walking. In 2021 it was two weeks of sitting, and we watched more sessions than we ever have in person. We rated each one out of ten, mostly so readers could skip the advertorials. A few things stayed with us.
Retail's pandemic year was an execution story. Walmart's Janey Whiteside described five years of transformation in five weeks, a three hundred per cent lift in pick-up and delivery demand skewed to customers over sixty-five who had never ordered online, and the plain advantage of already knowing where every item of inventory was. Dick's Sporting Goods, which grew sales and share through 2020, traced its resilience to a decision taken in 2018 to bring most of its software development in house. When the pandemic hit, contactless curbside pick-up went from idea to version one in under twenty-four hours and version two in another twelve. Dick's went from nine hundred stores and one distribution centre to one store and nine hundred distribution centres. It was our session of the show, because it showed technology facilitating innovation while the real drivers were culture and process.
The best technology is invisible. Marvin Ellison of Lowe's put it simply: the most effective technology is behind the scenes, reducing friction and making things easy, and innovation is about making things as simple as possible. Wayfair's Niraj Shah, in the same session, offered the line we still quote: "We always start with a human need. What is the experience people want us to create, rather than what we think we should create." He described e-commerce as an athletic competition that rewards the balanced athlete. Great quant marketing does not make up for bad merchandising. Whatever you are not good at slows you down.
Stores did not die. They changed jobs. Saks Fifth Avenue won luxury retailer of the year in a pandemic, and Marc Metrick's explanation was that store results were only slightly down, digital sales rose when stores reopened, and the biggest driver of online growth was store stylists adapting to online consultations. Digital was inextricably linked to the store, not a replacement for it.
Last mile economics were already breaking. The last-mile panel and the come-to-me retail session (refillable packaging delivered by truck to the neighbourhood, a milkman model with a twist) both pointed at the same thing: direct-to-home delivery at pandemic service levels was not going to be profitable, and pick-up needed to be prioritised. Two years later that was the consensus.
Innovation labs should not drive innovation. One panel on innovation labs drew a lower score from us than the quality of its speakers deserved, because we believe a lab that sits apart from the business is the wrong place for innovation to live in a retailer. The organisations that did well in 2020 innovated inside operations, not beside them. We had not written GRIT then, but the observation is the seed of it.
Back in New York, the notes we brought home were about purpose, people and the rising stakes of omnichannel, with AI, in the pre-generative sense, quietly underneath everything.
Retailer purpose is evolving, but a retailer's purpose is still to be a retailer. Not a technology company (Walmart and its cloud partnerships are the exception that proves the rule), and not a charity. You can get everything else right and still fail if the product or service is wrong. The stores we admired were the ones where purpose showed up in the merchandising rather than the mission statement: Bottlerocket "de-snobbing" wine with mission-led matching ("Want pizza? We have a wine for that"), and the Harry Potter store, which is incredible theatre built on very solid retail foundations, with a floor plan that separates the people who came for the experience from the people who came to shop.
Retail is a people business. Team members were looking for careers, not jobs. Education and training were the recruitment and retention story everywhere. Team members were motivated by social purpose, and it mattered more that you did it for them than for customers. Wages had to be competitive. There was a circular benefit in supporting the communities your team members live in.
Sustainability had moved from marketing to operations. Most retailers could not be zero impact, but they could be responsible. Golden Goose putting recycling, repair and tailoring into its stores to extend the life of its sneakers, and everyone else's. Avocado telling its sustainability story through the store design and the passion of the team rather than words.
Omnichannel stakes kept rising. Buy online, pick up in store had become buy anywhere, receive and return anywhere. Stores needed to become efficient logistics hubs, and where there was no store nearby, a stand-alone hub like Nordstrom Local, which was built to solve returns and ended up handling tailoring, pick-up, beauty recycling and donations. Ganni running one cart across every channel. Best Buy's in-store, in-app experience, with prices, stock levels including open box, and send-to-front-of-store checkout. Frictionless checkout was becoming scalable, from handheld POS to scan-and-go to just-walk-out.
AI was already fuelling everything. Starbucks' Deep Brew driving personalisation, labour allocation and inventory. Lowe's using an AI hiring assistant to screen and schedule. Walmart's supplier negotiations handled by a chatbot from Pactum, which reached agreement with sixty-four per cent of the eighty-nine suppliers in the trial in an average of eleven days, with savings on spend and better payment terms, and with most suppliers saying they liked being able to counter-offer. That was 2023. The tools have changed enormously since. The question of whether the organisation is ready to be changed by them has not.
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