This year’s Top 100 list, which saw the largest net store decline in the history of the study, in some ways reflects a broader trend impacting retail as a whole.
On the surface, the easy conclusion would be yet another claim of retail apocalypse and the ultimate demise of brick-and-mortar retail. And given current events with stores across the country shut down due to COVID-19, Art Van’s recent liquidation and last week Pier 1 seeking bankruptcy court approval to do the same, the negatives just keep piling up.
But such blanket conclusions are always misleading, and this instance is no different. A closer look at net store declines in the Top 100 list reveals disproportionately large store cuts from a small number of players, chief among them a now-rebounding Mattress Firm. As you’ve seen written in this space before, Art Van’s demise was anything but a result of retail apocalypse but rather a death by inflicted debt. And Pier 1’s recent liquidation request more accurately reflects a once-unique retailer’s inability to keep pace with changing times.
In some ways, Pier 1 is perhaps the best exemplar of the real trend occurring today at retail, which is a sea change in how consumers shop and what they want from a store when they do it. Pier 1, best-known as Pier 1 Imports in its heyday, grew up with the Baby Boomers, offering incense and Eastern-influenced décor to a generation chasing self-actualization through combinations of chemical enhancement and flirtations with Eastern philosophy.
Filled with bamboo, wicker, incense burners, elephant and Buddha statuettes, Pier 1 Imports was a softer, more acceptable alternative to headshops and gift chains selling black lights and psychedelic posters. It was in some ways mainstreaming of a counter culture movement that proved so successful it attracted serious money, grew more mainstream and ultimately yielded a template that could be mass marketed across the country.
It is a common enough story. A unique specialty concept emerges, achieves success and begins to grow. The lure of that growth and attendant wealth sparks expansion. Expansion and scale create the need to for systemization, which in turn homogenizes the concept and eliminates the unique qualities that made the concept viable in the first place.
You could say the same about Bed Bath & Beyond and the whole industry of home specialty stores it’s outlasted.
Successful retailers are constantly reinventing themselves, constantly evolving to meet a changing marketplace and keeping an ever-watchful eye on changing consumer wants and needs. One need look no further than the top of this year’s Top 100 list. The industry leader has so deeply embedded the concept of reinvention into its culture that it identifies and marks each one, reinforces them at company events and rewards those who help drive them.
If there is a lesson to be learned from this year’s Top 100, it is that good retailers that are willing to embrace change, to learn and adapt, are and will remain viable and valuable — today, tomorrow and beyond.
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May 25, 2020 at 08:03PM
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Blog: Top 100 furniture stores show retail in microcosm - Furniture Today
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