I recommend reading it if you can, but a summary of the points author Derek Thompson made include:
- This pandemic is like a forest fire, burning away the underbrush and preparing the world for new growth once the embers die down and the soot begins to recede into the soil. But the destruction will take down many businesses that were healthy before the fire aren’t in any position to endure its flames.
- Most mom and pop businesses (particularly restaurants) will not survive this wave, and the distinct character of many neighborhoods will be lost as chains move in and homogenize our public spaces. Big businesses are going to take over everything because they have the money and the growth mindset needed to thrive in the world to come.
- Restaurants are going to shift towards a more transactional model of take-out and delivery, and many may lose their connections to their customers in the process of becoming vendors rather than experiences. Quick-service chains like Chipotle and Dunkin’ Donuts are the future of city dining, not unique local fare. Uber Eats, DoorDash and Instacart are going to be the future of frontline service.
- Immigrants, who’ve been an important part of making cities vibrant and unique and filling niches where big business doesn’t want to open stores, are going to have less and less of a role in shaping the future of American cities, particularly if the government continues to enact xenophobic policies.
- Ecommerce is going to rule the retail sector because it allows for contactless delivery and convenient shopping. But it will come at a price by making many of the shopping districts within urban areas and suburban malls and shopping centers have to flip to using their stores as service centers and showrooms to support their online business. Those who don’t won’t be likely to be around.
- The desirable cities of the future will be those that have distance built in to their infrastructure. Being crowded into a downtown area is poisonous during a pandemic, and the memory of COVID-19’s effects on those who were sequestered into small apartments and detached from city life is likely to shape a new trend towards light urban and suburban dwelling.
While it’s hard to accurately predict the future (and Thompson may prove to be wrong on some points as our country’s response to this pandemic takes unpredictable twists and turns!), I would describe much of what he foresees as being highly probable at the very least. History is filled with calamities and disasters that create not just great moments of turmoil in a given moment, but multi-generational movements towards adaptation and change. I was in London over the Christmas holiday last year, and I was struck by how much of the modern city was built on the ruins of what had once been before different fires and disasters had washed away the oldest parts of the city and required the residents to build something new in their place.
The future will be dark for some, but it will also be bright for others. We will lose much of what we once knew in exchange for a new normal that we will all accept. And if history has shown us anything, it’s that future generations, inspired by the stories and pictures of the past, will find inspiration in our older ways and bring them into their own era in their own unique way. I suspect a lot of what is to come will be enmeshed with technology in some way, and the experience of shopping in a store or dining in a restaurant will be built not upon the idea that online interaction is optional, but rather, that online interaction is the foundation of the experience.
From an experience management (XM) point of view, this is both exciting and concerning, because it means that a lot of data will likely be tracked and available through online services used to participate in service delivery, but it also means that there will likely be a focus on boosting metrics rather than on relying on personal intuition to serve customers’ needs.
One of the most distinctive qualities of mom and pop and boutique-style stores is the ability for individual people to connect with their customers in a way that’s made very difficult by big box and large corporate organizations, who always want to standardize service to be the same at any story, but who tend to force employees to regress towards a mediocre mean as a result.
Having worked in both the retail and food service sectors as a frontline worker and manager, I know that the best employees were not those who hit our corporate goals (which were often misguided and even irritating for customers), but who focused on relating to customers and serving them as personally as possible. We didn’t need metrics to know we were doing a good job; our customers would compliment us and let us know in the moment. Our foot traffic would increase as word of mouth got around about the superior experience we offered, and our sales numbers would go up because people actually enjoyed shopping in our store.
By contrast, I knew managers who were struggling because they focused on their corporately-defined metrics and managed to hit them, but weren’t good at pleasing customers. They were playing the game of appeasing a spreadsheet on a corporate server hundreds of miles away; me and my team were playing a game of delighting customers who were right in front of us.
The challenge for those in the XM field in the future may be to learn to look back to the pre-pandemic era and ask what lessons were being learned before social distance required us to step back and replace great experiences with more wary transactional behaviors. My advice to anyone in the field is to keep a journal of notes and articles about these changes now, as it may provide invaluable guidance for the future.