Bart Waldeck:
Hi, everyone. And welcome to Location is Everything, Tango’s podcast about store life cycle management. I’m Bart Waldeck, your host, as usual. In today’s episode, we’re going to continue the discussion we’ve had about the impact the pandemic has had on buying patterns and how people are shopping today in retail. And in particular, focus in on the impact to the brick and mortar side of the business, given the fact this is Location is Everything. In previous episodes, we’ve dug into this behavior change where more and more purchasing is going online. In fact, obviously when the pandemic hit, it was forced to 100% online or pickup, but we want to look at not just that change in consumer, but what is the downstream impact of the way people are shopping now more with online pickup and delivery, i.e. omnichannel becoming more and more important, and specifically, how that relates to the impact to supply chains for retailers, distribution, inventory, store operations, store format. There’s a lot of downstream impacts here. In order to help us wrap our head around this, see what’s changed, where things are going, we’ve asked, Shai Verma, a partner from Deloitte in the retail practice in Canada to help us unpack all the implications. Shai, welcome to Location is Everything. I really appreciate you joining today.
Shai Verma:
Hi Bart, thanks very much for the opportunity to talk to you and your followers.
Bart:
Yeah. Well, we do appreciate it. So why don’t we kind of kick off, give us a little bit of background on yourself and your role there at Deloitte.
Shai:
Sure, happy to. I’m a partner here with Deloitte Canada in our retail practice part, as you mentioned. I’ve spent probably 25 to 30 years in sort of professional services, professional advisory, consulting with Coopers & Lybrand. That of dates me for some of your followers that know Coopers, so back in the day. But went to IBM, Hewlett Packard, and now Deloitte, and kind of working almost exclusively through that time with retail and consumer packaged, manufacturers, and distributors. I’ve spent most of that time working on both sides, the advisory side, as well as the implementation side. Definitely feel a lot of experience within the industry and some of the issues that the clients that we serve are dealing with.
Bart:
Well, that’s why you’re here for sure. Any particular sector of retail that you focus on, grocery or hard lines or apparel?
Shai:
I’ve been fortunate enough to work internationally and working with retailers, in Europe, in South America, across the states and in Canada. But in Canada over the last few years, we work with general merchandise retailers, apparel, health and beauty, grocery…in Canada, it just happens to be that the largest clients that we’ve got here are all grocery clients. And again, you can bundle Walmart into that mix, they’re very broad in terms of their assortment, but grocery is probably the area that we do most of our work in here. Over the last couple, we’ve done some very interesting work in terms of transformation, technology driven transformation with a number of other retailers across sectors. So, home furnishings, general merchandise, etc.
Bart:
That’s kind of what we’re looking for. Obviously, it’s been a strange 12 months. We’re almost coming up on a year here, believe it or not, since the pandemic hit. You’re on the frontlines, you’re talking to these retailers across these different sectors. How have they fared? What are some of the big impacts that you’ve been seeing?
Shai:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I think the best way to respond to that it’s feast or famine. I think a lot of the grocery retailers have actually done very well through the last 11, 12 months. They’re essential services, even during lockdown, which in fact, Ontario, the province that I live in, we’re in lockdown right now until the middle of next week, and I’ve been in lockdown since Christmas, but because they’re an essential service, they’ve stayed open. I think impact from a demand perspective has been fairly limited. The other side of that coin is, general merchandise retailers have had to become very innovative to be able to support demand generation, fulfillment, all those things that I know we’re going to talk about. They’ve really had to do some very different things to be able to sort of stay financially viable. And as we know, many retailers have not been able to do that over the last 11 months. There’s been a number of companies that have closed down. Even here in Canada, our largest general merchandise retailer HBC has just announced a number of store closures and employee displacement, so there’s definitely been some impact.
Bart:
Feast or famine, I think is a great way of describing it, kind of this acceleration of people who weren’t really prepared. And those that were prepared, i.e. investing in omnichannel and online and other forms of distribution, really could lean into what was happening in the pandemic and grab more market share. And we’ve seen that in some of the Targets of the world, the Panera Breads, the Chipotles, the Walmarts, for sure. This acceleration to online towards more, at least the purchase side of things occurring online, you may pickup still or get delivered. The estimate from a lot of the experts and I think you guys are on the same page too, is that we’ve accelerated what was already happening naturally within retail at a slower pace in moving things more online from a purchase perspective.
And I think some of the terms, or I should say, timeframes thrown out there as we’ve jumped 5 to 10 years in a three month period as it relates to kind of moving online. And although post pandemic, most experts don’t believe that’s going to stick at that high of a level, it’ll come back, but it’s not going to come back to pre pandemic levels. At least that seems to be the consensus. So as you’re seeing a lot of these retailers were kind of baptized by fire, when stores closed and you’re forced immediately into a 100% pickup or delivery type of situation, if you’re able to stay open. They didn’t have the facilities or the setup or the inventory to really kind of facilitate that type of situation of a 100% delivery or pickup.
While things have kind of stabilized more. I think some of these changes that people have implemented are being more thought out and more systematically brought back into the store itself. Question to you is, how has the pandemic in that shift to delivery and pickup and some in store really thrown a wrench into supply chains?
Shai:
There’s no one easy answer. Every retailer has tried to address things relatively uniquely to some extent. Here in Canada, and I can speak about that probably more specifically. For grocery, online grocery was a novelty for a long, long time. In the states you had Webvan, quite a long time ago, and it was ahead of its time, frankly. And we had a company called Grocery Gateway here in Canada that did the same thing. Now, Grocery Gateway has maintained its presence, but now the other large grocers have created their own channels for eCommerce. And they’ve been doing very, very well. So things that consumers would have felt uncomfortable about buying online, like produce, for example. Meat, they’re now saying, “Well, we have to give it a try because there’s obviously something that’s compelling us to give this a shot and we’re not comfortable going to stores, so we’ll do it online.” And if now these retailers, these grocers are providing these products online and a commitment that we’ll make it right. If it’s not properly delivered, we’re going to make it right.
And so I think that comfort is now increasing for grocery, where it probably wasn’t there for everybody. I mean, for the Millennials, for the people that are more comfortable with the online experience, they felt pretty comfortable about it very quickly. But I think for the rank and file, for the gray hairs like me. We’re realizing that this is something that is going to become part of the new normal. I don’t see it going away. Just basically, it’s another channel for customers to leverage. I mean, the whole buy online, pickup in store for grocery is also become quite a mature capability, if you want to call it that, for a lot of grocers. And so they’re doing very well with it. Every major grocery is doing it.
For general merchants, I’ll give you a bit of an example. We were working with a client. Again, it was purely luck that they chose to go online with a new eCommerce platform, six months before COVID hit. And as a result, their online business increased by 500%, from pre COVID to post COVID in that first sort of, let’s say three to six months, while the stores were closed. It increased by 500%.
Even since the stores have reopened and now there’s this ebb and flow of opening and closures, et cetera, which I think will still go on for a little bit of time, at least in our jurisdiction here. Their eCommerce business has increased by three fold, 282% or something like that. I think what that tells me or tells us is that, those customers that were uncomfortable shopping online have realized that this is not so bad. And again, your point about accelerating in three months would have taken a half a dozen years to do in sort of normal time, is absolutely true.
For example, this client that I’m talking about, home furnishings, they have sort of lower end products, in the two, three, four, $500 range, but they have higher end product up into the 5,000, $10,000 range. Nobody ever thought that a customer would buy a $5,000 mattress online. Without looking at it, without touching it, without sleeping on it, without lying down, whatever it is. But now they’re realizing that customers are getting more comfortable with that. And again, because this particular retailer has a 100 day comfort guarantee or whatever you want to call it, they feel that they have an adequate out, if things don’t go according to plan.
Bart:
All that kind of move to pickup as an example, or even delivery. A lot of it was being dispatched from the store on the delivery side of things. And the pickup obviously is coming from the store. From a supply chain perspective, typically you’ve got the distribution center to distribution center is feeding all the various stores within a certain geography. It kind of shifted some of that and I assume some of the supply chain needed to change as a result of this kind of shift to pickup and delivery.
Shai:
When I talked about the increase in sales of 500% or 282%, whatever. That’s the purchase side of things. The fulfillment side, were still leveraging their old, antiquated delivery models. And that’s what they’re now trying to … I wouldn’t say they’re struggling, they’re not struggling. They know that it’s an issue. And they’re putting some focus on trying to resolve and optimize that part of the experience, that part of the customer experience. So the online part, fine. You can browse and get a sense of what it is that you want to buy. And this goes for grocery and other categories too.
But now that last mile, the fulfillment piece is really the part I think that has to be addressed. And it’s a laggard. At least, again, in the Canadian context, we’re realizing that a lot of retailers are going to focus on that last mile delivery and enhancing that part of the customer experience Bart, which is being done through a number of different things. So obviously, technology plays a huge part in that.
Given where Amazon’s being able to take their business, where you now are getting tracking, shipping notices on everything you buy, whether it’s a roll of toilet paper, or it’s a large television. You’re getting information real time. Where’s my order? But I think a lot of the other retailers are trying to use that and figure out how to make that part of their offering without and doing it while they’re still maintaining their profitability. Because there’s obviously a huge issue there.
The idea of more micro-fulfillment centers Bart, is another thing that a lot of retailers are now starting to consider and some of them, their stores. The stores become the fulfillment centers, as you said about the online pickup in store, but others are actually saying, “Our stores are closed for whatever reason. And now we’re going to create micro-fulfillment centers.” That may be the same location as a store, but they’re being used to fulfill a lot of the online orders, etc. And that seems to be another thing that a lot of companies are considering.
Bart:
What you’re saying, reminds me of kind of … I’m here in Chicago and there’s a Whole Foods close by and we never ordered grocery. I consider myself somewhat of a technology forward person, when it comes to online shopping and stuff like that. But for some reason that category, grocery was something I never really ordered or had delivered. But obviously, when the pandemic hit, we had to do that and we did a Whole Foods. And then you notice, even their operation changed from what it was when it first started to what I’m experiencing now, nine months in. And they have the technology, it allows me to understand where my order is at any given time. And I keep thinking in my head mentally, “Oh, it’s the store right up the street that’s fulfilling me.” But then when I look at the map that says, “Your order is here.” It’s coming from downtown Chicago and I’m the first suburb outside of Chicago.
Just that dynamic, when is the order placed, what goods are being asked for? Is it coming from a mini-distribution center, or coming from a store, coming from a main distribution center. They’re even doing pickup and delivery from those locations. It’s got to be a very complex problem to solve. And it’s probably even more complex for your food retailers because there’s so many SKUs, a lot of it’s perishable. How do you kind of optimize that, where it can come from? The fact that it’s coming from downtown Chicago surprised me for some of the stuff I was getting delivered, some of the frozen stuff and things like that. It seems like a complex puzzle to solve.
Shai:
Customers are going to buy any darn way that they want to buy. They’re going to buy online for a lot of stuff. They’re going to go to a store for things that they are uncomfortable buying online. That’ll continue to be the case. They’ll do the buy online, pickup in store for those products that are easily accessible to put in your car or your van or whatever have you. But retailers are going to have to realize they’re going to have to create multi-channel. So omnichannel has been a term for a long time, and we’ve traditionally meant, well you can either buy it in the store or you can buy it online. And now there’s everything in between and retailers are going to have to really get comfortable on not only creating a capability to provide that, but also the financials to support that in terms of a sustainable business.
Bart:
And often in a low margin reality, right?
Shai:
Certainly, in grocery. I mean, that’s the thing, the margins are so small that Deloitte uses a framework – we responded to COVID, we recovered from COVID. Now you have to thrive in sort of COVID. It may not be COVID, but there will be other disruptions in the broader supply chain, in the broader ecosystem that every retailer, because they’re at the frontlines of this with their consumers and its consumers that drive their business. So they’re going to have to figure out ways to stay on top of this.
And this whole idea of profitability has to be built in. The network rationalization, the optimization that they’re going to have to do. Well, why do they fulfill from downtown Chicago, while they could be fulfilling from the store right down the street? I mean, they have to figure out, what are the financials? What are the business dynamics that say that that makes it sensible to do so. So there’s a lot of heavy lifting in the background before you can actually see the logistics and the technology part of this sort of takeover.
Bart:
Yeah, it’s interesting because people don’t realize often that, kind of lack of a better word back office kind of reality of things. And it’s accelerating a lot of these bankruptcies we see. Those companies that were not necessarily optimized even for a traditional retail, and then they get thrown this curve ball, and they can’t sustain it. And it accelerates them, which may have taken five years, in six months into bankruptcy. But just to jump in on what you were saying about the buy online, pickup in store, BOPIS. I always have to rethink that when I say it.
I know McKinsey recently came out with a COVID-19 US consumer Pulse Survey that they did it back in September. And from that data appears that BOPIS has jumped 50%. So people are buying online, picking up store, quite a bit more. And I’ve seen an evolution. I’ve done it myself. Now there’s dedicated parking spots. There’s sometimes a dedicated area within the store itself. You’ve got employees coming in and out and dropping stuff off. So how do you see retailers kind of adapting to this new pickup reality and what is working in your opinion? What needs to change?
Shai:
I think one of the things that I would suggest, again, there’s different versions of BOPIS for every different retail entity, for every different product category. I mean, BOPIS means one thing for grocery. It means a different thing, if you’re buying a television. It means a different thing, if you’re getting lumber from Home Depot or whatever it happens to be. So I think the number one step is, is nobody can do this haphazardly. You really have to think it through, walk a mile in your customer’s shoes and really understand how they’re going to interact with you, when they arrive in your parking lot. You’ve got dedicated parking stalls, like you said. You’ve got dedicated customer service people that are focused just on BOPIS.
If you really want to accelerate BOPIS because it’s much less expensive for a retailer enable the BOPIS channel than it would be to deliver at home. The logistics are easier and basically you’re using now your store as that fulfillment center and BOPIS is the easiest way to do that. So you really have to think it through, walk a mile in their shoes. And again, I mentioned earlier that the customer is always right, but the customer can screw up everything. And I mean that in a very facetious way, I know I can screw it up a royally, even though I think about these kinds of things. You just need to make sure that you’ve thought through any eventuality or as many as you possibly can. So the customer’s experience … Because once they try it and it doesn’t work, that’s probably the last time they’re going to try it. It’s hard for you to bring them back. They’re going to go back to what they’ve always used and that will be probably the thing that frankly, societally is the one that probably everybody needs to start thinking about differently.
Bart:
Differently. Yeah, exactly. And it’s interesting that it … I wonder what does it do to inventory levels and stock outs and stuff like that when they have these pickups, and then on the operation side of thing, do you need a different type of employee? Do you need a different kind of training for kind of more of a fulfillment role then an actual like customer service and cash register and all those types of things?
Shai:
I think you’ve nailed it on the head there, Bart. That you do need to train your employees, your staff to provide a different service, because it is done differently. It isn’t the same as walking through a till and bagging your groceries or providing the product in some plastic bag or whatever happens to be. You now have to think differently about it. So that’s what I mean by walking, not just in your customer’s shoes, but even from an associate point of view. You have to think through all the process steps. In the age of technology and digital this and digital that, at the end of the day, the weakest link, and not because it’s human, but it’s the process that’s always the weak link, that needs to be looked at. And that’s where things will fall down. And you have to really … Again, this is a bit of a consulting answer.
Bart:
I was just going to say, we’re consultants. We love process. Right?
Shai:
We do, we have to. I mean, because that’s the way we understand how things get done and not just how they’re done in an ideal way, but how they’re frankly, done with all the different variations that may come up. What if it’s snowing? What if it’s raining very heavily? Is there a different part of the parking lot that you go to, if there’s some of those types of environments? It all impacts customer experience and satisfaction and that’s kind of the thing everybody’s trying to maximize. So yes, I think you really have to do that process work.
Bart:
You’re giving me flashbacks. I don’t want to do that Visio or those swimlanes at all. All right. So something else you mentioned before, I think is equally important to the delivery trend. That’s going … Excuse me, the pickup trend that’s going on, which is delivery. That’s the other kind of side of the coin, that it’s absolutely exploded. It had started in the restaurant business prior to COVID, but for traditional retailers, whether it be hard goods or soft goods. It’s kind of a new game for them. And a lot of these, as we said, the folks who were well-positioned going into the pandemic, already understood the Amazon effect. Being this kind of customer expectation, that next day delivery is table stakes. And oh, by the way, it’s now moving in many cases, same day delivery.
So if you’re going to beat an Amazon, you need to match that. And the big, large successful chains like Target and Walmart and others understood that. And they wanted to kind of own that last mile, own that delivery. So Target bought Chips a couple of years ago, Walmart purchased JoyRun at the end of last year, and then smaller retailers struck these partnerships with the Instacarts of the world or the Postmates. And then on the food side, Uber Eats or Grubhub. So this kind of dynamic of delivery has really changed the game even more maybe than pickup did, because like you said, it’s more expensive. You don’t necessarily, if you partner up, get that data of, where that customer is or where it’s going and things like that. So how do you think that has changed the dynamic for how stuff is distributed or inventory or store operations and those types of things?
Shai:
I think from an inventory perspective, Bart. The challenge will come down to, again, immediate visibility, sort of, you sell one, you replace one type of mentality. And again, that will mean that the supply chain has to be much, much more agile than it ever has been before. And so that nimbleness, I think, will really be the one differentiating factor across all of this. We’re saying this in the context of the supply chain and inventory management, but when you think about the entirety of retail, those retailers that are agile, nimble can react to changing market conditions quickest will be the ones that will succeed. And so that has to be a mentality and a discipline and a skillset that these companies sort of build into their business models.
It’s very easy to say, it’s very difficult to do, to build in that agility. And one example of this might be what’s happened here in Ontario is that, when COVID first hit in March of last year, stores got shut down. Everybody had to go to online where they could, those that couldn’t basically went to zero revenue, but then we opened up through summer and through most of last year. Stores opened up with fewer number of people coming in, but they figured it out. How to open the tills again, if you know what I’m saying, but now we’re closed again. And so this back and forth and back and forth, is something that is going to be a part of, I think, not just from COVID, but from other again, disrupting factors. That companies will need to figure out how to manage with that sort of whiplash effect almost of going from a 100% of stores open to a 100% of stores closed and everything in between. And it doesn’t matter what industry or what vertical of retail you’re in. So I think that agility and being nimble is extremely important.
Bart:
Walmart, basically their supply chain optimization is what allowed them to become what they are. And when you think about it now, you have to integrate all these different sources. Typically, you’d ring it at the cash register and you’d know, or you’d have an online distribution, and it’s got its different inventory sources. But now when you start doing more delivery out of the store, that’s not being rung up at a cash register. So how do you integrate that with the cash register ring ups, and then know that the store is depleted at this level? And when I look online, I really want to buy that video game for my son and they say there’s two left. And I go in the store and there’s none, and I’m upset as a customer. So the complexity is just astronomical.
Shai:
That’s exactly the point. Customers are going to be pulling at you from many different ways and they’re going to want that same level of experience that they’ve always come to expect from any retailer. And it’s becoming more and more challenging to do that because of all of these different pulls and different channels that are in place.
Bart:
And I think, a lot of people, especially in the kind of term of the retail apocalypse and the stores going away and everything going online. That’s a bit myopic in thinking about where the purchase occurs. Do I pick up a phone and order something? Do I order it online or do I go into a physical store? That’s one thing, but then there’s the inventory source. Is it coming from a distribution center or a warehouse or a store now more and more? Ad then ultimately, where’s acceptance of the goods occurring? Where’s the fulfillment, in the store pickup or delivery?
So when you look at those, the idea the store is going away and becoming less important is really the opposite. It’s becoming more and more important. We did some recent work where we kind of mapped out all the different flows between purchase point, inventory source and fulfillment point. And when you look, there’s like nine or so of those, if you split the online from the phone. In all but two of them, a store is one of the three boxes between purchase, inventory, and fulfillment. And in many it’s two. For example, I can order online, the store could be the inventory source and I could pick it up or I can order online the source is the store and it’s delivered. So the store is in between all of these. So it’s almost becoming a linchpin to a successful omni-channel reality.
Assuming you agree with that, we’ve talked a little bit about this, but I know from a store location strategy perspective, it’s no longer about, what’s my catchment area? What’s my trade are that I pull into this store? It’s also going to be, what’s my ring of distribution for delivery and pickup? So that could move the puzzle pieces around the board, when you want to optimize your revenue and profitability at a market level. But it also has these downstream impacts we’re talking about on the store format itself. On the quick service restaurant side of things, I’m seeing prototypes now with four drive through lanes and three pickup spots and same for grocery and other stuff like that.
So the box itself, the four walls are going to have to change. Are you seeing that? Are some of your clients contemplating kind of, “Well, we need more square footage for pickup inventory and we need lanes and we need all these different things.”
Shai:
Yeah. I think we are starting to get quite a bit of questions about what the role of the store is going to be and whatever the future entails. So when you think about the role of the store, as you say, is it basically your traditional bricks and mortar store, where you drive customer traffic to, they conduct their business and they leave. That’s option number one, like you said, option number two might be, you buy online. But you still pickup to store to fulfill the order and get it completed. The concept of micro-fulfillment centers, I mentioned that a little bit earlier.
Most retailers are going to be thinking about that in one way, shape or form. The store and supplying a very major part of that concept of a micro-fulfillment strategy to say, “Why wouldn’t the stores be their fulfillment locations for a wider catchment area, not just for people that come there?” But for it to serve in the hub and spoke distribution model. Basically, the stores are the spokes, in essence. That’s absolutely something that I would think a lot of retailers are going to have to consider going forward. There are certain clients of ours right now that are planning. I haven’t seen anybody that’s actually started executing on that, sort of in a holistic manner, Bart. But definitely they’re all looking at it.
And again, to the earlier discussion we were having around distribution optimization, they really have to think about what are the economics and the financials of doing it that way. What happens to these large fulfillment centers that are thousands and thousands of square feet? If you’re now fulfilling from smaller locations, do you actually need large DCs? Those are very expensive to operate, much less stand up. And so there is a rethinking of it. And the challenge is, we’re in a bit of a hybrid world right now. We’re not quite sure what’s coming. And so for retailers to be making hard decisions about, “Okay, let’s get rid of X percentage of our distribution centers because we’re going to fulfill directly from stores.” I don’t know. And they don’t know whether that’s going to be the lasting model for them or not.
There’s a little bit of risk out there and therefore a little trepidation and hesitancy in moving forward.
Bart:
It’s interesting to hear you say that because we have a group of our clients from our company that are office occupiers and the same thing is going on in what we call Workplace 2.0. I actually have a podcast on that side as well. And the advice that most are receiving is, “Oh, we don’t need offices anymore. We’re going to shrink it down. You barely need that kind of footprint.” But you don’t know and you don’t want to be making those big decisions and bets on any type of real estate now, because real estate’s the long game. That’s 5, 10 year leases or you’re purchasing. It’s not something to make decisions willy-nilly on.
Shai:
Look, you and I are prime examples, you’re sitting in your living room, I’m sitting in my house and we’re working. And we found out that we can actually get a lot done working from home. So that point, there’s probably some relevancy. The fact that these large heavily occupied office towers are probably not … Again, I’m not an expert in this. This is a personal opinion, not a professional opinion. So you probably don’t need them. But at the other end of the thing, a lot of businesses rely on the face-to-face, in-person interaction to get stuff done. Even we find in our project work, that there’s something that gets lost when you’re not doing it in person with one another.
I think the same thing happens with retail. You can absolutely take that same dynamic to the relationship between the store and its customer. That interaction of the touching, the feeling, the looking, the haggling, whatever you want to include in it. It’s part of how we’ve learned to shop. The interesting thing is, as the current generation learns to shop differently, what’s going to happen in the next 10, 20, 30 years? I don’t have a crystal ball to say that. I’m sure there are lots of consultancies and frankly, Deloitte probably has a point of view on that, but that I think would be the interesting thing to discuss at some point.
Bart:
If you think about it, downtown Chicago, for me, a lot of locations for retailers, whether it’s restaurants or others is based on daytime population. So if, all of a sudden the urban center is vacant or reduced dramatically, you don’t need a location there anymore. So all of this stuff is going to be changing, but what is cool in a way is, it’s interesting. Things are changing and people need to adapt. And I think you’ve shed a lot of light for us today on kind of the impact of the changing consumer downstream into the supply chain inventory. The store operations, fulfillment, and things, areas that people don’t often think about that retailers really need to adjust. And there are big implications to the store footprint, where they’re located, what types of stores they are, in order to adapt to this new reality. So I really appreciate, I know our listeners appreciate you dedicating the time and be well.
