The U.S. has 40,460 grocery stores. If you want to see how physical retail might look 20 years from now, you might want to watch the grocery store space over the next three to five years.
If, as I wrote in January, retail’s success in 2021 and beyond will be defined by logistics, grocery is where we will see clear evidence of this — and where grocery stores’ successes and failures will play out in real time.
In grocery, a small number of platforms at scale will emerge to influence the consumer’s relationship with buying food and will power the…
The U.S. has mobilized the largest COVID-19 vaccination rollout of any country in the world. The Biden administration has set May 1 as the date that all states will be required to lift vaccine requirements to include any adult who wants to get the jab. President Biden says he’s hopeful that the U.S. will be ready to celebrate a return to normalcy come July 4. After a year of living life under lockdown, all of that is certainly welcome news.
Why, then, do most Americans still think it will take until this time next year — March of 2022 —…
March 19 will mark the one-year anniversary of the U.S. lockdown in the face of the global pandemic. Since then, the payments and commerce headlines have been mostly about one thing: the consumer’s massive shift to digital.
Mostly because it’s indisputable.
And it’s likely to be the biggest headline of the next year — and beyond.
In a digital-first world, checkout is no longer about a plastic card dipped at a terminal in a store — and potentially no longer the slam-dunk domain of the traditional issuers and card networks that own that experience in the physical world.
In a…
Thirty-three years ago, in 1988, in Washington, Missouri, the first Walmart Supercenter opened its doors. The store concept itself took a page from the European hypermarkets, which had begun dotting the suburban landscapes there in the mid- to late-1960s — a vast physical store footprint that sold everything from general merchandise to groceries, offering ample (and free) parking.
When Walmart reported its Q4 2020 earnings last week, CEO Doug McMillon described a very different “super” concept at the center of Walmart’s future: the “super app.” …
An article published in the Harvard Business Review in August of 2009 posed a question that many airline and travel industry CEOs are pondering 11 years later: Will videoconferencing kill business travel?
The answer in 2009 was, probably not. The answer in 2021 is far less clear.
Eleven years ago, video conferencing tech was in a very different place, even though the technology itself had come a long way from the commercial launch of Bell Lab’s Picturephone in 1964.
It was expensive — an investment that only big companies could afford to make, and mostly did so to make it…
The problem with a lot of “big” New Year’s predictions is that they’re really pretty small.
Most are so general that there’s no way they can be wrong. Take the one about the restaurant industry getting better in 2021, or the prediction that it will be the year of takeovers in tech.
Neither one goes out on much of a limb to predict what might be coming down the pike in 2021.
Of course, there’s a lot to be said for playing it safe. …
You can see it in the quarterly earnings reports this year of just about every publicly traded company and among the list of companies that have either gone public one way or the other or have filed S-1s because they plan to do so soon.
You can see it in how investors are putting money to work in both consumer-facing and B2B startups, and how startups and incumbents are forging new partnerships to move innovation faster to market.
And you can see it in the hustle by retailers and brands large and small to pivot their businesses and business models…
In June of 2019, PYMNTS asked a national sample of 1,037 smartphone users about their interest in having a single app that would make their everyday activities easier to access and manage.
The study described the app’s functionality as a more seamless way for consumers to keep tabs on how to plan, manage, spend and send their money, and to receive funds from other sources. The app would include reminders and alerts across a variety of activities — bills to be paid, appointments to be kept, deliveries to be received, important dates to remember, what friends are doing, etc. —…
On the same day that COVID-19 cases in the U.S. topped 10 million and hit 50.5 million globally, the world got news that Pfizer and BioNTech had successfully completed Phase 3 trials of a COVID-19 vaccine on 43,000 people — and achieved an astounding 90 percent effectiveness rate.
It was a day that medical scientists and epidemiologists had been awaiting for eight long months, marking a significant scientific breakthrough for the virus that hobbled the world. And it was a stunning result.
Not only had these vaccine trials proven an effectiveness rate of 90 percent — nearly twice the 50…
It’s one year from today: Nov. 9, 2021.
It’s been 18 months since the coronavirus swept the world and changed everything about it. But finally, the citizens of the world are ready to re-engage in the physical world the way they did in January 2020.
A widely available vaccine and FDA-approved therapeutics have given consumers the confidence that sitting together indoors, in a crowded restaurant, carries little to no risk. Neither does cheering on their favorite sports teams in a crowded stadium or booking that long-awaited vacation with family to a faraway destination.
And, boy, after 18 months of so…
