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How Retailers Can Keep Up With Consumers (McKinsey, 2016)
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Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
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This McKinsey retail strategy article from 2016 is currently inaccessible due to server restrictions; its relevance to AI safety topics such as human agency or manipulation is unclear without readable content, and it may have been mistagged or included as a peripheral reference.
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Importance: 10/100organizational reportanalysis
Summary
This McKinsey article from 2016 appears to cover strategies for retailers to adapt to rapidly changing consumer behaviors and expectations. The content is inaccessible due to an access denial error, so a full summary cannot be provided.
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- •Content is inaccessible; the page returns an access denied error preventing analysis of the actual material.
- •The URL suggests a focus on retail industry adaptation to consumer trends circa 2016.
- •Current tags (human-agency, autonomy, manipulation) suggest possible relevance to consumer choice architecture or behavioral influence.
- •Without accessible content, the direct relevance to AI safety topics cannot be confirmed.
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| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Erosion of Human Agency | Risk | 91.0 |
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How retailers can keep up with consumers
October 1, 2013 | Article
Ian MacKenzie Chris Meyer Steve Noble
The retail industry is more dynamic than ever. US retailers must evolve to succeed in the next decade.
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The North American retail landscape looks quite different today than it did even ten years ago. The way that consumers make purchasing decisions has dramatically altered: they stand in stores, using their smartphones to compare prices and product reviews; family and friends instantly weigh in on shopping decisions via social media; and when they’re ready to buy, an ever-growing list of online retailers deliver products directly to them, sometimes on the same day.
These shifts have led a number of industry observers to forecast the end of retail as we know it. Some predict that retail will change more in the next five years than it has over the past century and that the extinction of brick-and-mortar stores isn’t far off. Our view is less dramatic, but we do believe that big changes are inevitable and that retailers must act now to win in the long term.
There is historical precedent for this kind of upheaval, which recasts the industry’s winners and losers. Within the past century, local corner stores gave way to department stores and supermarkets, then to suburban shopping malls, then to discount chains and big-box retailers. Each of these shifts unfolded faster than the one that preceded it, and each elevated new companies over incumbents. Indeed, six of the ten largest US retailers in 1990 have since fallen from their positions as new winners, such as Amazon.com, Costco, and Walgreens, emerged in their place (Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1
Shifts in the retail industry often create new winners, as evidenced by changes in the top ten US retailers.
Yet history also offers incumbent retailers some hope: industry shifts have actually tended to unfold slowly—over decades, in most cases—providing time to react. While it is true that powerful forces are at work in retail today, we believe their full impact won’t be felt for years. (For instance, despite the e-commerce boom, brick-and-mortar stores should still account for approximately 85 percent of US retail sales in 2025.1 1. Based on Forrester Research data and McKinsey analysis.) That said, incumbent retailers can’t expect to stay successful by going about business as usual. In this article, we discuss the ma
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