零售业生死之辩

    几个月前，笔者在百思买（Best Buy）亲眼见证了零售业的现在和未来之间惨痛的冲突：一对二十出头的情侣在平板电视展区晃来晃去，一会儿粗鲁地摆弄遥控器，一会儿重重地拍打音箱。两人看起来心不在焉，与普通的购物者毫无二致。最后他们确定了一款三星LED电视，这时那位男士突然拿出手机，拍下电视的二维码，然后连接到网络，查找更优惠的价格。

    然后，他对自己的女朋友说：“亚马逊（Amazon）上的价格可比这儿低49美元。”

    他们一边在享受百思买丰富的产品展示所带来的真实体验，同时却选择在线订购，最终得利的却是亚马逊，当然他们自己也享受到了实惠。但这种做法无异于在百思买的伤口上撒盐。

    这件小事包含了很多与未来零售业相关的元素，比如手持设备、网络，以及更加自主的消费者等；对于脚踏实地的传统零售商而言，这些或许会让它们感到绝望。但不论未来如何，实体商店仍会继续存在。

零售业真的要消亡了吗？

    众所周知，早在1998年，尼古拉斯•尼葛洛庞帝就曾预言零售业必将消亡。他曾预言互联网将改变购物方式，这一观点已被证实，但他认为实体商店将走向终结的预言却并未成真。毫无疑问，零售业仍处于不断进化中。比如纽约布鲁克林一家名为Shopbox的商店就是这种进化的产物，这家店通过专门销售威浮球（Wiffle）和带自动装置的商品（Thing-o-Matic），向人们展示了这一地区玩世不恭的民风。商店的展示厅其实是一个船运集装箱，有一面大型单片玻璃落地窗，并且没有明显的入口。最近，这家商店被迫搬迁，于是商家直接就用吊车将其运到了新的地点。

    顾客根本没有机会与商店里的店员“打情骂俏”，甚至不必进入店铺，只要通过橱窗就可以查看其中陈列的商品。如果顾客相中了某件商品，可以把订单用短信的形式发送给Shopbox，然后在家里等着他们送货上门就可以了。

    这种方式与欧洲比较普遍的手机支付方式密切相关。英国零售业巨头乐购（Tesco）在韩国的分店Home Plus便是这一理念的先行者。为了扩大市场，公司在地铁站的墙壁上张贴了传统货架的2D海报。其中包括牛奶、果汁、水饺、拌饭酱，以及在韩国超市中随处可见的各种日常用品。当然这些都是虚拟商品，顾客只需通过智能手机拍摄商品的二维码，便可以直接将这些食物添加到在线购物车，然后坐等店家送货上门即可。上班族在车站已经浪费了不少时间，何必再花费宝贵的时间亲自到商店购物呢？

    从某种程度上说，这些例子对近期的零售体验来说是一种提示：如今零售业不再是消费者去超市采购，而是商品寻找消费者。时间似乎又回到了过去，当时货郎开着货车挨家挨户叫卖，锅碗瓢盆叮当作响，告诉人们有食品出售。当然，两者最大的差异在于，过去的流动杂货店老板需要猜测客户的需求，而反过来，消费者的需求也基本受到店铺老板供货能力的限制。其中并没有多少商量的余地。

    Just a few months ago, I witnessed retail's present and future collide in a Best Buy (BBY). It was ugly. A twenty-something couple fiddled around with the flat screen TVs on display; mauling the remotes, thumping the speakers, and generally behaving like carefree shoppers. When they settled on a Samsung LED model, the guy whipped out his phone, captured a QR code on the TV, and beamed it up to the web to check for more favorable prices.

    "It's 49 bucks cheaper through Amazon," he said to his girlfriend.

    They rubbed salt into Best Buy's wound by ordering the TV online while still standing in the store, enjoying Best Buy's endless display models, all to the benefit of Amazon (AMZN) -- and themselves, of course.

    Even though this story contains many elements of retail's future, like hand held devices, the web, and empowered consumers; this isn't sustainable for retailers with boots on the ground. Fantasy futures aside, real-world stores are here to stay.

Death of retail, really?

    Back in 1998, Nicolas Negroponte predicted the death of retail as we knew it. While he was correct to say that the Internet would transform shopping, he was wrong to think it would be the end of physical stores. Still, they are changing, no doubt. For instance, there's the Shopbox, a self-conscious Brooklyn pop up store selling that borough's playful bohemianism in the form of products like the Thing-o-Matic and Wiffle balls. The showroom is a shipping container, with a big picture window and no clear entrance. Recently, when the store had to move, a crane just picked it up and carried it to a new spot.

    You are not going to be flirting with any sales clerks at this store. Instead of stepping inside, you examine the goods through a window. When you want to buy something, you text your order to Shopbox and they ship the stuff straight to your house.

    This ties in nicely with the fairly common practice in Europe of paying for goods via cellphone. Korean grocer, Home Plus, a division of English giant Tesco (TESO), pioneered this concept. To expand their market, they set up 2-D posters of a typical grocery aisle on the walls of commuter rail stations. They included milk, juice, dumplings, bibimbap sauce and everything else you'd expect from a grocery store in Korea. Except none of it was real. Feed an item's QR code into your smart phone, and that food goes into your online shopping cart, to be delivered straight to your home. Why waste time in a store when you're already wasting time at the train station?

    In a way, these examples flip the recent retail experience on its head, so that the goods seek out the consumer, rather than the consumer going shopping. It's almost like the days when men drove wagons from farm to farm, pots and pans clinking to announce there were dry goods for sale. Of course, a big difference is that the proprietor of the traveling general store had to guess what his customers wanted, and his customers' wants were pretty much limited to the proprietor's offerings. There was little back and forth.