Bricks and Mortar Retail: New Demands on Engineers and Designers To complement the burgeoning on-line retail market, bricks and mortar stores will be putting new demands on their technology and MEP infrastructure By Tom Bailey, AIA and Sean Phelan, Associate AIA In a recent article in the New York Towns Magazine, we explored the effects of online shopping and COVID on the future of Bricks and Mortar retail. In particular, our HUNT engineers, architects, and economic developers sought to develop a primer for town officials, property owners, and retailers seeking to create vibrant Main Streets that will appeal to both their current residents and those they would like to attract. This article, like the NY Towns’ snapshot is modest in scope, attempting to flesh out and identify the various technological, physical, and engineering elements that comprise a “typical retail store” and how an engineer and architectural designer might help a town official or property owner prepare that physical space for the future of retail. Although we start with what will sound like a doomsday statistical scenario of trends, store closings, and deep challenges to the traditional retail model, we believe there is enormous opportunity in the near and long term for retailers and engineer designers if they accept the inevitability of on-line shopping and create spaces that answer the “continued” need for a customer-centric “experience”, however different than the one of even several years ago. First, we look at the smart phone’s role in this sea of change, layout the current economic statistics, and suggest several likely scenarios. For the purposes of this audience, we disassemble the basic elements of a prototypical retail store and attempt to illuminate even a few of the changes already in place and others likely to come…. for example, “Why have a cash register when I can go to Amazon Go, open my Prime app, put my food in my cart, and walk out the door without talking to soul!?” (30 stores now open and coming to your neighborhood soon....) Identifying and attracting ‘just the right mix” of retailers to New York’s Main Streets has always been topic number one at community planning, business, and economic development meetings. Shy about being too prescriptive, many of those conversations use to turn more on which “retailers were not wanted”, with adult bookstores, cell phone stores, strip clubs, and rowdy nightclubs, for example, being told they were unwelcome or pushed to the edge of towns. At the same
14 | The ROCHESTER ENGINEER MARCH 2021
2021 Infrastructure - Setting the Stage time, even before the tsunami known as on-line shopping, competition from malls and big-box retailers camped on the edge of town had already left vacant storefronts or windows covered by the shades of professional services – accounting, legal, and non-goods tenants.
COVID...an Accelerant not the root cause of Bricks & Mortar Stores’ troubles
In early 2021, with virtually all of us carrying smart phones, we forget that the smart-phone culture and the economy that has grown up around it is for all intents and purposes barely 15 years old. While the phrase “smart phone” was coined in 1995, the addictive power of the Blackberry (‘crackberry’) did not take hold until around 2005, with the first iPhone being introduced in 2007 and Android systems in 2008. Between 2011-2014, the sophisticated touchscreens and camera software we now take for granted started to appear as standard phone features, and with them the battle truly commenced for the approximately $27 Trillion worldwide, retail consumer market.
Retail Snapshot: By the Numbers
Fast forward to 2020, and it is easy to blame the COVID-19 pandemic and the quarantining of America for the rapid downsizing and bankrupting of famed retailers like GNC Nutrition Center, Pier I Imports, Men’s Wearhouse, Stein Mart, JC Penney, Bed, Bath & Beyond, etc… And, in fact, according to the US Census Department, US retail sales were cover article
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