CONSUMERISM
SWISSQUOTE MARCH 2019
CONSUMERISM
FEAR IN RETAIL
Shaken by the e-commerce boom, supermarket brands are starting to fight back with technological investments and mergers. Their survival is at stake. BY ANGÉLIQUE MOUNIER-KUHN
J
ISTOCK
eff Bezos is a self-described “congenital optimist”. During the course of one day on 26 November 2018, the richest man in the world saw his fortune – made up primarily of Amazon shares – increase by $6.3 billion, according to Bloomberg. That Cyber Monday, a marketing ploy that began 15 years ago to promote the e-commerce boom, shattered all forecasts in the United States. Sales were up 19% compared to the previous year, reaching nearly $8 billion (source: Adobe Analytics). Amazon, which makes up half of all online retail sales in the US, won the lion’s share of these record sales.
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SWISSQUOTE MARCH 2019
In a sign of the times, another US retail giant declared bankruptcy a few weeks earlier: Sears was weighed down by years of strategic misguidance and losses. The news caused the media to wax poetic for yesteryear. The death of this department store veteran, which opened in Chicago at the end of the 19th
century, is proof of the consumption habit revolution that has hit traditional retailers hard – first large department stores and now supermarkets. According to the US Department of Commerce, online sales already make up 13.5% of total retail sales in the United States, compared to 4% in 2010 – and this inexorable growth is causing brickand-mortar shops to close in waves as a result.
The industry was caught unawares by the magnitude of transformations over the last 10 years Rather than call this an apocalypse – the preferred term used by US commentators to describe the constant bankruptcies and the desertification of big retail stores – Dominique Locher likens it to a tsunami. “The first wave was for 51
