When your correspondent told this story to Heidi O’Neill, now head of Nike’s consumer and marketplace division, she got “goosebumps”. It recalled a time, she said, when Mr Knight and his colleagues, struggling to get the business off the ground, put shoes on the feet of one runner at a time. For decades afterwards, she says, Nike was unable to replicate the intimacy of this one-to-one customer relationship, as it relied on rapid expansion of its wholesale business.
Supermarkets, which had earlier hoped that a mass stampede online was still five years away, suddenly found that even grandparents were mastering the dark arts of ordering groceries and booking slots. Such was the surge in demand in the early days of lockdown that Ocado, a British online grocer, thought for a while that it was under cyber-attack.
Centuries later came the Industrial Revolution, which led to the second big retail transformation. This was a new system of factory-produced goods that a growing number of working-class shoppers could afford. Supported by a blitz of advertising, these goods were distributed by shops that grew in size to benefit from economies of scale. The set-up is familiar to many today: mass production supports mass consumption.
In parts of Asia, however, this is a time of exuberance. China’s embrace of e-commerce reflects the ubiquity of smartphones, the shortage of attractive shopping centres beyond the big cities, and high urban density, which cuts the cost of delivery. Yet China also stands out for a level of innovation, such as live-streaming by celebrity lipstick-sellers, that few saw coming.
For consumers the benefits are obvious. They will gain greater convenience from being able to shop either physically or virtually, depending on their mood and circumstances. But for retailers, the challenges are immense. They have to pay not only for the costs of their stores but also for a form of digital “rent” to display their goods high up on online search channels such as Facebook. They must not only pay for delivery but also allow customers to pick goods up in their shops.
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