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A comeback for physical stores

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    Americans have been shopping online like crazy during the pandemic, right? Motivated by fear or convenience, more of us felt comfortable clicking ‘buy’ from our sofas – including to buy sofas – and there is no turning back.

    That’s true. And also, well… no? Or maybe?

    New data from the US government shows something that surprised me: Brick-and-mortar stores will beat online shopping in 2021. No kidding.

    Americans spent 18 percent more on food, cars, furniture, electronics and other retail products last year compared to 2020, the Commerce Department announced Friday. Online retail sales rose 14 percent. In other words, e-commerce lost ground to physical stores last year.

    Admittedly, 2021 was a strange year for shopping. More of us had the urge to browse in person than in the scary early months of Covid in the US. Rising prices and shortages changed what people bought and where they shopped for. And a year will not change the long-term trend that online shopping is drawing more and more Americans into the wallet.

    But the comeback for brick and mortar stores also points to how difficult it can be to predict the speed at which technologies change our behavior and the effects if and when they do. The future doesn’t necessarily come in a straight line.

    My point is not limited to shopping either. One of the big debates for our economies and lives is to what extent the coronavirus and its digital adaptations could permanently change all aspects of how we spend our time, including the future of office work, cinema and exercise habits. The honest answer is that we don’t really know. A lot has changed, but also a lot hasn’t.

    Brian Wieser is one of my favorite number nerds and he pointed out to me that physical stores won in 2021. Wieser, the global president of business intelligence for the advertising agency GroupM, said he had been zooming out in two-year blocks to assess the disruptive effects of the pandemic on businesses and us.

    Wieser described what he had seen as a “new plateau” — the pandemic accelerated digital trends already underway and kicked our usage to the next level. Many people researching human behavior have also talked about the ways in which we have become familiar with e-commerce, remote working, telemedicine and online socializing, which might not have happened until 2025 or later had it not been for a pandemic.

    Wieser’s data processing shows that we shopped more online in 2020 and 2021 than in a two-year period since 2006. Amazon and Walmart have also encouraged their investors to look at two-year blocks. At Amazon, this may be partly due to poor sales. During the last six months of 2021, Amazon showed its lowest revenue growth in 20 years.

    Juozas Kaziukėnas, the founder of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, asked me a question a few months ago that I haven’t been able to forget: Has the coronavirus really forced us to shop more online – or just shop more, period?

    It’s a confusing time to judge what technology has changed in us. Wieser’s visual metaphor of a plateau is helpful. We may have reached a new level of familiarity with and use of technologies. That doesn’t mean we can predict where we’ll go from this new perch.

    We (myself included) are still terrible at predicting the future of technology and how people and societies will react to it. Sometimes a new app that we keep talking about turns out to be Instagram, and sometimes it’s Ello. (Don’t you remember Ello? Exactly.)

    And human behavior can change slowly, until it overwhelms us. We may feel that online shopping is ubiquitous, but even now, more than 85 cents of every retail dollar in the US is spent in brick-and-mortar stores.

    So which one is it? Is online shopping the future of how we buy and change everything or is it a relatively small change that has huge ripple effects. Yes.

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    A raccoon peers over his doggy† I’m imagining a sweet story for these two.

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