John Ryan
RETAIL ENVIRONMENT
Hybrid stores: not for everyone
The hybrid shopping model is gaining pace in the retail world, but John Ryan questions whether it’s a suitable option for greeting card shops
“It is the nature of the beast that an awful lot of in-store purchases are made on the spur of the moment. Impulse plays a pretty major part in selection”
For those of you who attended, Autumn Fair is already a memory and thoughts are now, presumably, turning to Christmas. But it’s worth reflecting on the musings of Theo Paphitis, the man behind stationery chain Ryman and a dragon on the wannabe entrepreneur series Dragons’ Den, who said at the gathering in his keynote speech that ‘hybrid stores’ are already here and they’re here to stay. By this, he meant that the digital and physical sides of the retail equation no longer exist, and that today’s shopper is confronted by both elements when walking into a shop. Practically, this means that the shopper buying an item in a store is as likely to end up doing so having left the premises, to pay using a digital wallet and perhaps to consider other items when browsing (in the store) online. Or put another way, today’s shopper is a little like an indecisive government minister, flip-flopping from one thing to another and equally at home with what might seem like two almost mutually exclusive ideas.
John Ryan is Stores Editor of Retail Week, a position he has held for more than two decades, and managing director of Newstores, a daily information service on what’s new in retail across the world. @newstores | www.newstores.co.uk | 07710 429926
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And yet is this really the case? If shops really are hybrid and if we are as at home with the virtual as the physical, then why bother going into a store? Your correspondent is old enough to entertain the old-fashioned view that the greatest ‘experience’ to be had in a physical store is the notion of walking in, selecting something and then emerging with the object of desire. This also happens to concur with the idea of what shops are about – places where things are shown that can be purchased, for the most part, there and then. All good, and a supplementary point perhaps is that if shopping involves endless gazing at a handset, then why bother going into a store at all? The answer, it would seem, is that a lot of us still regard shopping as an activity that means looking, touching, feeling and assessing products in situ; something that any amount of online activity won’t actually be an adequate substitute for. As far as greeting card shops are concerned, there would seem to be two things to be considered. First, it is the nature of the beast that an awful lot of in-store purchases are made on the spur of the moment. Impulse plays a pretty major part in selection. This is straightforward if there’s a lot of cards and you can
flick through hundreds of items, visually, in a couple of minutes. Now try doing the same online and it’s a pretty time-consuming business that requires you to click through page after page. Life is short and if you are prepared to spend time doing this on your phone while in a store, instead of taking the visual shortcut prepared by the shopkeeper, then you might want to take a bit of a look at how you are using your time. There are certainly categories in retail in which the shopper will benefit from some additional knowledge - white goods and sofas spring to mind and perhaps the ‘bigger’ the ticket, the more this is likely to be the case. But when it comes to items where the top end is around the £5 mark, then being ‘hybrid’ might seem to be a waste of the shopper’s time and of the retailer’s money. Hybrid stores, in the terms referred to by Paphitis, are confined to specific retail types. Greetings cards may be pretty low down the hybrid list and, for the moment, given the rapidity of the transaction involved and the ticket price, it would seem as if things might stay that way. Call me a Luddite if you like, but hybrid may not be for everybody, at least for the time being.
