The experience of shopping for furniture is unlike any other. Buying furniture that reflects your family’s needs and lifestyle, that brings beauty, enjoyment, and stature to your life…viewing these selections with a capable and concerned sales consultant who understands how important your home is to you…this is the value that brick and mortar stores can offer their customers that no digital experience possibly can.

Consultive selling, including in-home visitation, is what most stores need and few stores offer. Ethan Allen stores have known this for 50 years and were successful in their day…but equipping sales associates with these kinds of skills takes time, structure, and total company commitment…and training sales associates is often not done well when left to individual store personnel because they lack the skill and depth of understanding to do it effectively.

The focus of what we do in PMP Consulting should be to identify what we can do to help the small to medium-sized retailers improve the in-store customer experience. This starts with re-inventing the role of the salesperson to match the needs of today’s consumers. This is the least expensive way to help a store succeed – and it has the most lasting results. To accommodate this, the organizational structure of the company must change to make this experience the top priority for every person and every department.

I’d take the premise of the Forbes article with a grain of salt. Headlines are optimized for clicks. “Doom & gloom” messaging gets much more attention than balanced reporting. I think we all got a taste of that over the last year with a constant barrage of negativity and end-of-the-world reporting regardless of the underlying data.

I think it’s important to differentiate between small independents (and their woes) and industry giants. The large stores and chains that went out of business all had one thing in common: They were massively over-leveraged by PE firms. In the end, they simply drowned in debt. Here are some thoughts (and data) on that: https://www.wondersign.com/what-the-absence-of-the-retail-apocalypse-teaches-us/

We have heard about the “Retail Apocalypse” for years now and it’s just not true. Most digitally native brands have opened brick & mortar stores. Opening stores has a positive impact on e-commerce sales in that area. So, to prevent extinction (to stay true to the clickbait approach), the online and offline experiences need to move closer together. Abandoning brick & mortar just to focus on a website is not a winning strategy.