The Week In News, But Shorter

The Week In News, But Shorter
January 1 – 7, 2024

Happy New Year! We hope you all had a restful and rejuvenating end of 2023. We most certainly did after ending the year with a flurry of events and we are charged up and ready to tackle the year ahead!

If you haven’t visited us on LinkedIn recently, head over to our page and feel free to share some of your predictions for 2024! 

Digital Meets Physical

’Tis the season for a retail tech-stack rethink [RetailDive] The rise of online business brought IT solutions out of the backroom and into the forefront of retail operations. But, as another holiday buying season puts customer-facing solutions to the test, retailers are rethinking their tech stacks.

2024 – A look ahead to the year in retail tech [Chain Store Age] Generative AI will continue to be a generator of retail technology headlines in 2024, but TikTok will also make a splash. 2023 saw the world fully emerge from the pandemic and return to “normal,” just in time for a leading-edge artificial intelligence technology called generative AI.

AI is helping cut the carbon footprint of online shopping returns [Semafor] Online retailers are beginning to grapple with a major source of waste and greenhouse gas emissions from their operations that has largely flown under the radar: Returned items.

Micro & Last Mile Fulfillment

Can the Last Mile Become a Fast Mile? Drone Delivery Could Make it Happen [RetailTouchpoints] Despite now being a regular occurrence around the world, for many, drone delivery still carries an aura of sci-fi mysticism. A recent study by Northwestern University found that drones and ground-based robots are particularly off-putting for consumers — even compared to other automated delivery options like self-driving cars.

2024 will be a breakout year for delivery drones [Axios] After more than a decade of development, delivery drones are finally going mainstream this year. Still, they won’t be quite as ubiquitous as the blue Amazon vans or brown UPS trucks in your neighborhood — yet.

Shoppers use BOPIS to avoid holiday shipping delays: report [RetailDive] Signaling the closing shipping window, buy online, pick up in store comprised 25% of online orders in the three weeks after Cyber Monday, according to Salesforce’s analysis of data from 1.5 billion consumers.

Free shipping is more important to shoppers than same-day delivery: Forrester [RetailDive] Amid retailers’ investment in order fulfillment, some services may be more worth investing in than others, according to a Forrester report. Same-day and next-day delivery, in particular, are costly for retailers to implement and are not strongly desired by most shoppers, the report found.

Restaurants & Ghost Kitchens

2024 Food Trend Predictions Include More Plants, Nostalgia And Tiny Treats [Forbes] Wonder what Americans will be eating next year? Experts who surround themselves with food have a few guesses. And, spoiler alert, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Expect current trends seen on social media to take full force in IRL, with plenty of plants on every plate and more diversity in culinary projects across the country.

Walmart adding more in-store poke restaurants [GroceryDive] Walmart plans to grow the number of its locations that have in-store poke restaurants through its partnership with Uncle Sharkii Poke Bar. The expansion of the poke restaurant at Walmart comes at a time when retailers are adding more made-to-order and ready-to-eat foodservice offerings to meet consumers’ hunger for food-for-now options. 

6 Reasons the Middle Class Can’t Afford To Dine Out Anymore [Yahoo! Finance] Menu prices are rising, middle-class families have less money to spend on wants like dining out and people are coming face-to-face with the consequences of an expensive tendency to over-rely on restaurants to do their cooking for them.

Mall Talk

The Backroom: Doug Stephens’ retail predictions for 2024 [RetailDive] Was this year in a way another chapter in a late-pandemic story? In fact, retail and branding expert Doug Stephens believes that the industry is hanging on too tightly to 20th century habits that must be broken. 

How IKEA Downsized to Go Downtown [The Wall Street Journal] There was no instruction manual when IKEA’s Paris team set to work building a new kind of city-center store. The Swedish furniture company’s ambition was to create a smaller version of its stores for downtown consumers. 

UCLA acquires L.A.’s former Westside Pavilion to transform empty mall into the UCLA Research Park [UCLA] UCLA has acquired the former Westside Pavilion shopping mall, which the university will transform into the UCLA Research Park — bringing together scholars and industry experts from around the world to create a nexus for discovery and innovation that will benefit Southern California and beyond.