Retail Renaissance
I have a confession to make. In 1999, I gave a conference presentation where I foretold the demise of high street retail within 25 years. Here is what I said: “In 2024, consumers buy information products exclusively on-line. When they buy travel, an information product at the point of sale, they do not dream of leaving the home or office to walk into high street retail premises that cannot even physically demonstrate the product, let alone provide any more information than they can access on their net appliances. They look back to the last few years of the Second Millennium and realise that this was the period when the On-Line Era began. They realise that travel, more than any other industry, contributed to a new way of life. They know that, during that exciting period of change, the travel industry showed the world that electronic distribution is the preferred way of retailing.”