Features

With increasing pressure from online retailing, traditional retail environments must strive to remain at the forefront of innovation and reinvention. While some may feel brick and mortar retailing is facing extinction, the data say otherwise. Petrie Richardson Ventures (PRV), founded in 2000 by Chairman Walt Petrie, recently commissioned a large-scale survey that examined the influence of evolving social, lifestyle, entertainment and technology developments on shopping habits across the US. The more than 75 question online survey of a demographic representative of 1,018 shoppers 18 years of age and older was conducted by ORC International, one of the American Marketing Association’s Top 50 Research Firms. It’s all about the experience The critical takeaway from our results is that Americans — especially millennials — place a high value on the total shopping experience. Specifically, the survey showed that what shoppers value most about retail experiences at malls and shopping centers versus online shopping is the physical experience of the actual brick and mortar retail environment — with 85 percent of respondents reporting that holding products or trying on clothing is key to their shopping experience. It’s simple: experiential retail environments are what online retailers simply cannot offer. Online retailing may seem to be …

The e-commerce revolution has changed consumers’ shopping patterns and generated downstream repercussions that business leaders like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett were out in front of early on. These e-commerce icons, of course, are early adopters of new technology who made fortunes by anticipating the opportunities associated with e-commerce. Back in 1996, Steve Jobs said, “The heart of the web will be commerce.” Warren Buffett sees online retailing as a massive growth opportunity, as evidenced by Berkshire’s recent acquisition of online retailer, Oriental Trading. Jeff Bezos, a founding father of e-commerce said this: “Your margin is my opportunity,” meaning his goals are to flood the marketplace with as many online purchases as possible (increasing package deliveries as a ripple effect). Is it working? In the United States, of all e-commerce growth in 2014 and 2015, Amazon accounted for 60 percent. The explosion of online purchases seems easily predictable in hindsight. This year, consumers and businesses will make more purchases online than in brick and mortar stores. However, many businesses and consumers are bumping into a bothersome bottleneck that occurs at the back end: package delivery and acceptance. Naturally enough, with their embrace of online purchasing, consumers have grown …

For the second month in a row, U.S. nonfarm payroll employment experienced a big increase, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In June, employers added 287,000 net new payroll jobs, beating economist forecasts by more than 50 percent. The job gains in July generated more positive headlines, as employers added 255,000 new payroll jobs, once again blowing away economist forecasts that predicted 180,000. These numbers are especially welcome after a disappointing May, where job growth of 24,000 fell well short of predictions. REBusinessOnline asked two economists — Robert Bach, director of research for Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, and Ryan Severino, senior economist and director of research for Reis — what this news means for the commercial real estate industry as a whole. REBusinessOnline: The employment data has looked fairly healthy in the last few months. Yet, U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) increased at a 1.2 percent annual rate in the second quarter (subject to revision), which isn’t terrific. What are we to make of these seemingly mixed signals about the health of the economy? Ryan Severino: GDP has never been the best measure of the health of the economy. That’s not really what it was intended to do, though …