Brave For Free

Multi-channel – store, phone, online, mail-order - is finally maturing . For the longest time, retailers promised and customers expected this muti-headed hydra of a retailer present seamlessly across every channel, moving between channels with similar lack of seam, permitting mix & match of all kinds. For the longest time, reality was disappointingly different. Retailers spent the last decade launching anaemic web stores; proudly announcing that they were multi-channel and hence so much better than pure-play e-retailers. Unfortunately those feeble attempts remained the stuff of boardroom backslapping and upbeat press conferences - neither actual shoppers nor pure play e-tailers took much notice. Staples , John Lewis and a few others remained rare exceptions. What took so much time? Retailers aren't exactly clueless idiots, why didn't this get figured out a long time ago? Futurebazaar was exactly such an attempt; indeed many customers assumed automatically that we were mult...

In my last post , I talked about how giving up some of the trappings of physical retail is not without its costs. This post is about the flip side of that coin – in a way. What caught my eye was Wal-Mart's new facility allowing customers to pay cash for online purchases. The announcement (made a little over two months ago) comes with a twist unfamiliar to those Indians happy with cash on delivery – this one requires you to visit a Wal-Mart store to pay cash for what you bought on the Internet. After same-day pickups, this seems Wal-Marts latest attempt at that famous silver bullet that was supposed to defeat Amazon – multi-channel. Online shopping is still a small percentage of worldwide retail, but it is expanding far faster than the boring brick kinds. Profits may not be stellar, but growth certainly is - Amazon is climbing the ladder faster than an MBA on steroids. And physical retailers are feeling – if not the heat, then at least the smell of smoke from the flames. After ye...

Walls between work and life have broken down. Companies have not noticed. Work and leisure used to be quite distinct once upon a time (and that wasn't so long ago either). Work was carried out at designated hours in the workplace, with tools that the employer provided; home was spouses, kids and paid vacations. Even where you carried work home, it usually meant a temporary exile to the kitchen table. Once, only artists and rockstars lived without such boundaries. This, of course, is long gone. Laptops and telecommuting started the blurring process a couple of decades ago, but things really went south with the advent of  the smartphone. Uniforms gave way to business formals, yielded to business casuals before finally jumping off the roof entirely when the flip-flopped dotcommers took over. Work texts were shoved between bites of dinner, treadmills served as venues for conference calls, angry birds flirted with corporate emails and social networking finally nailed all those coffins f...

Mass market retailing is an expensive business. Rents, staff, inventory – the average brick and mortar retailer struggles along with barely visible net margins (spontaneous dancing is known to happen at 5%). With thousands of stores, hundreds of warehouses and over two million employees, Wal-Mart has in the last five years managed a profit margin of just 3.5%. The story is no different for any other major brick & mortar retailer, American or desi. Cool-kid-on-block Internet retail, on the other hand, thumbs a nose at the old-fashioned ways and gives the distinct impression that it can do much better. There's just one small problem. The bellweather Amazon, for all its buzz, seems unfortunately to have done much the same (indeed, a little less at 2.48% over the same period); nor has any other sizeable virtual retailer done much different. What gives? The law of unintended consequences, that's what. Lets take two of the most discussed items – rent and inventory. Mind you, thi...