Commercial vulnerability
If you have a retail chain that offers:
A variety of products
at high margins
that are easy to ship
without being needed immediately
in expensive retail locations
where the in-person shopping experience isn’t particularly remarkable…
Then you’re in big trouble. Even before the pandemic. Because an online retailer is going to offer a better-priced, more convenient, higher-variety alternative and once your best customers try it, they won’t come back very often.
That seems pretty obvious, and we’re seeing the retail landscape littered with companies that should have seen this coming but didn’t do anything about it, because they were too busy protecting what they thought they were good at.
The question for most of us is: What if the work you do is:
compliance-based
standardized
repetitive
not based on innovative or flexible customer interaction…
If it is, it’s pretty likely that you’ll be replaced by a combination of robots, AI and outsourcing.
If they can find someone or something cheaper than you, they’re going to work overtime to do so.
The alternative is to be local, creative, energetic, optimistic, trusted, innovative and hard to replace.