RETAIL RECOVERY: HOW CREATIVE RETAILERS ARE WINNING IN THEIR POST-APOCALYPTIC WORLD
MARK PILKINGTON
� 2021, Bloomsbury
$28.00 / higher in Canada
310 pages

Buy, buy, buy.

That's what you want customers to do when they come to your store: open their wallets and buy. But things have changed during the pandemic. In his new book Retail Recovery, Mark Pilkington shows readers that retail survival hinges on getting customers to buy in.

If you've paid attention in the last twenty-two months, you know that shopping has changed. First of all, says Pilkington, retail stores shuttered in droves or were bought up by larger companies; storefronts were left empty and landlords struggled to find tenants. Big brands often disappeared along with their stores, or they cut manufacturing. Retailers struggled to get goods shipped from overseas and trucked to physical locations, while customers struggled to find a store open for shopping. Add quarantines and shelter-in-place mandates, and you have a recipe for convincing customers to shop online. Worse still for brick-and-mortar stores, consumers have learned to love the convenience.

What a mess.

There's hope in Retail Recovery, but not until about a third of the way into the book. For the first eighty pages, Pilkington tells readers things they already know: in the last several years, even before the pandemic, stores struggled, declared bankruptcy, and closed. Yes, the book includes statistics, and yes, Pilkington writes about the outlook overseas, but it's more of the same news that business-savvy readers already know. It's a reminder, for sure, but a dismal one at that.

And yet Pilkington offers hope. During these "difficult changes," he claims, "the groundwork was being laid for a potential, yet very substantial, Retail Revival."

Because consumers have shown that they're willing to pay more for purchases from a service business, smart retailers have learned to set themselves up as professionals or experts. Consumers, Pilkington says, also want to shop with a conscience, and they're attracted to businesses that are "purpose-built."

If you are a retailer, Pilkington advises you to learn from your website by collecting customer data and integrating your online and physical presences. Hire a customer service consultant and learn to embrace "showrooming" by offering customers home delivery or automatic re-ordering. Remember: brick-and-mortar stores can lend personal touches that online entities cannot; retailers need to utilize that advantage by offering customers more than they can get from an impersonal website.

Says Pilkington, such reinvention is the "only route forward."

Get through the stuff you already know—skim it if you want—and then settle in. There's good advice in the last two thirds of this book, and intriguing information that may help find the survival skills you might need if you're a retailer—although you might think it's pretty commonsensical, once you've seen it in print. In your heart, you already know this stuff, but Retail Recovery still might help attract customers to buy, buy, buy.