In a world of immediacy, focused on instant information and commentary, the season of publishing the year's results is a good opportunity to take a step back and look forward to the period ahead. After the storm caused by two years of pandemics, we were eagerly awaiting the players in the world of retail and commercial real estate to express themselves and map out the path(s) of the future, on the basis of which our distribution system was to be rebuilt.
However, we remain a little disappointed - and even perplexed - by the way in which they have approached this exercise: the carefully chosen figures for 2019 are presented as the benchmark against which to compare ourselves to say either that "everything is a little less bad, or a little better", no doubt unconsciously fuelling the idea of a possible return to "business as usual". Didier Duhaupand, Chairman of Les Mousquetaires, commenting on the results of the Mousquetaires group, even asserts that "nobody believed in this story of the world before and the world after"! Life goes on, then, without there being any "death of tiles", the pandemic having merely erased the excesses of the past, the challenge being to work as closely as possible with customers, and certainly not to know "whether to ally ourselves with this or that Gafa".
Is that really all?
No one, whether retailer, property developer or investor, is really at ease explaining today's figures, especially when taking those of 2019 as a benchmark, as if it were Year 1 of the new era of commerce! Indeed, historical comparisons have been lost, erased by two years of pandemic that make it impossible to measure the real state of health of the protagonists, for those who aren't already down and out. Not only have the figures, whether for traffic or sales, not returned to "pre-pandemic levels", but they are constructed so differently that any comparison becomes hazardous and complicates the analysis, when it doesn't outright distort it.
This obstinacy in comparing ourselves to the world as it was shows, above all, the great uncertainty in which the players in this market find themselves, making all projections very uncertain. While all the diagnoses of the collapse of the old system have been made, the vision of tomorrow's world and the solutions to be implemented remain hard to discern. Not only has the current economic climate further strained the situation, but the explosion that has shaken the world of commerce, commercial real estate and, more generally, urban planning, continues to spread. And no sector has been spared: environmental and ethical issues, the explosion of second-hand goods, new proximity, the implementation of short circuits...
Of course, there's no shortage of "brilliant ideas" - and the list is growing by the day - to meet these challenges! Some have their own delivery system (the Carrefour group is currently experimenting with more than ten!). Others, capable of mobilizing gigantic funds, want to reinvent commerce by replacing it with dark stores, URW is launching drive-to-store... All solutions which, it should be noted in passing, are based on the store, which remains the pivot of strategies boosted by digital.
While this flowering of ideas is rich, they remain very (too?) focused on "quick commerce", placing logistics at the heart of the issues, the profitability of which remains to be found. In fact, none of them has really provided a clear answer as to the results to be expected in terms of sales performance, yields and, above all, profitability, which should justify the restructuring and investments to be made. Everyone is still looking for a business model based on an overhauled operating statement in which the relative share of each item will have been readjusted, starting with the share of logistics, real estate costs and the accompanying tax burden.
Against this backdrop, we can only express our surprise and concern at the fact that to date, nothing has come out of the Assises du Commerce, whose report and proposals for revitalizing the retail sector are still awaited. It is apparently easier for some to declare moratoria than to lay the foundations for overhauling a sector that accounts for over 3 million jobs...
The road to reconstruction may well be a long one yet! This reconstruction requires the courage to look forward, to look resolutely ahead, and to stop looking backwards, except to convince ourselves that nothing will ever be the same again.
Jérôme Le Grelle (ex-CBRE France) joined Mytraffic last March as Senior Advisor.