The death of retail is greatly exaggerated

I’ve been thinking a lot about retail these days and I’ve been connecting the dots between the seeming death of retailers like Ralph Lauren and the book industry. In short, we are feeling the seismic echoes of the 2008 crash right now on Main Street and things are both ugly and pretty at the same time.

The book industry, like the music industry, nearly imploded when the world stopped spending its disposable income in the last recession. This led to much doom and gloom and it also led to the rise of ebooks which, at the time, cost far less than a paperback or hardback. Therefore power readers, for lack of a better word, ditched bookstores and only those who enjoyed the book buying experience over the convenience of online kept going to bookstores. And, in seemingly an instant, we saw the collapse of Borders and Barnes & Noble and the death of print in America.

Or did we?

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John Biggs - Tech Crunch - 21 Apr 2017