Think about major developments in the grocery retail industry between 1940 and 2015, and by major I’m talking about advances that are truly transformational in nature.
When I went through this exercise I came up with only three: The development of self-shopping, the development of UPC barcode scanning, and the development of capturing customer identified transaction data via loyalty programs.
Now consider major developments in just the past three years: Amazon Go self-shopping, automated distribution centers, self-driving vehicles, robots in store, robotic food preparation, drone deliveries, artificial intelligence everywhere, voice-based shopping, and more.
That explosive growth in just the past few years makes it obvious that we’ve hit the inflection point on the exponential growth curve of technology and that change is only going to happen faster and be increasingly noticeable.
Now alongside this explosive growth of technology put recent forecasts of store closings: Coresight Research states that 5,864 stores closed in 2018 and projects 12,000 store closing this year (2019). Tom Blischok, a long-time industry observer, estimates 30% of traditional supermarket chains will be gone by 2025, five short years from now. And UBS Securities projects a whopping 75,000 stores will close across all retail sectors by 2026 if eCommerce continues to grow from today’s 16% to 25%.
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