Off The Shelf

"If the retail sector is ever to be investable again, it has to be given the chance to grow." - Mark Burlton, Cross Border Retail "Some of these large retailers are, frankly, facing imminent death from the mortal wounds inflicted by the pandemic." - Chris Keen, CFO LloydsPharmacy --- My family are often shocked by the deeply inappropriate metaphors I sometimes draw from history to describe real world problems. Natural disasters, wartime events. But it would be quite a job to ransack the arena of human history to find a metaphor distasteful enough to describe what's about to happen in retail. 'Ticking time bomb' has already become a cliche (and in any case, that 'bomb' exploded at the start of the pandemic). What we are seeing now are the foreshocks of a major earthquake which will reshape the retail landscape forever. And the faultline about to slip is between retail landlords and tenants. Tensions between physical retail and landlords have been

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” — Robert A. Heinlein Privacy intrusion, the surveillance state. Call it The Creepy Internet . A few months ago, I attended a day-long seminar at a well-known global technology company. They are partnering tirelessly with companies applying machine learning, big data and artificial intelligence to know you better than you know yourself. We’ve all experienced ‘stalker’ ads that follow you around online - even after you've bought the product - but this goes way beyond that level of creepiness. It’s not simply that disconcerting feeling of seeing a product before you consciously knew you wanted it. We piece together ‘reality’ from a remarkably small amount of information, and increasingly that reality is manipulated through your connection to the digital world. This can be positive: it can help us make healthy choices, avoid traffic jams, keep in to