Retail didn’t die; it merely reset

I had breakfast with the CEO of Hammerson, Rob Wilkinson, at The Silo Hotel last week. It was one of those conversations that forces you to rethink a narrative we’ve all become comfortable with. If you’ve been paying attention over the past few years, you’ve probably heard some version of this: retail is dead, e-commerce has won, big malls are dinosaurs.

Except, sitting across the table, listening to a business, which was “on its knees six years ago”, talking about growth, expansion and rising values, it is evident that the story has evolved into something different. Retail didn’t die; it adapted. And in some areas and cases, it has come back stronger.

Wilkinson put it bluntly: “The past 18 months have shown how the retail market has transformed.” What’s changed is not demand but rather behaviour. It’s the “renaissance of retail”, as Wilkinson calls it. The rise of platforms like Amazon forced retailers to rethink everything.

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But instead of replacing physical stores, online has ended up reinforcing them. “The market now understands you need to be online and offline,” he said. Omnichannel isn’t a buzzword anymore; it’s essential for survival.

And most importantly, it’s profitable. Hammerson said the most valuable customer today was the one who interacted both digitally and physically. They spent more, returned more often and engaged more deeply with brands.

Courier services are expensive and retailers are slowly but surely realising that they cannot solely absorb the costs anymore. When you want to return an unwanted item, retailers encourage you to come into the store for the return — most times this results in the same customer purchasing more goods from the store. That has triggered a new trend we are seeing globally: fewer stores but better ones.

It’s not about scale and aggressive store roll-out nationally anymore; it’s about chasing quality spaces in better locations. Instead of 150 mediocre stores scattered across a country, brands want flagship space in the best-performing centres with the strongest footfall.

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