What Killed Retail May Also Save It

Everyone knows Jeff Bezos killed retail. Or was it the millennials? Or maybe the retailers themselves? There’s much less debate over the murder weapon: The smartphone did it. Mobile tech turned all the world into a shopping mall, supercharging the reach of online retailers like Amazon, and empowering consumers to “showroom” — that is, check every price tag encountered in physical stores against online competitors. But what killed retail may now be able to save it, Anindya Ghose, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, argues in his new book, “Tap: Unlocking the Mobile Economy.” “The same mobile phone that was harming retailers is now a huge blessing for them,” Ghose told MarketWatch. Retailers can now use mobile phones to leverage the vast amount of data they’ve collected on customers, and can then combine that information with GPS locations, weather forecasts and other data to lure shoppers into their stores in new and interesting ways, Ghose says. Read more at MarketWatch.