In a world of timeliness, focused on instant information and commentary, the season for publishing the year's results is a good opportunity to take a step up and better plan for the period to come. After the storm caused by two years of the pandemic, we were impatiently waiting for players in the world of commerce and commercial real estate to speak out and chart the path or paths of the future on the basis of which our distribution system would be rebuilt.
However, we remain a bit disappointed — and even perplexed — at the way in which they approached this exercise: the carefully chosen figures for 2019 are presented as the reference to which we should compare ourselves to say either that “everything is a little less bad, or a little better”, undoubtedly subconsciously feeding the idea of a possible return to “as before”. Didier Duhaupand, president of Musketeers, commenting on the results of the Musketeers group, even affirms that “no one believed in this story of the world before and the world after”! Life therefore goes on, without there being “a death from tiling”, the pandemic having only erased the excesses of the past, the challenge being to work as close as possible to customers, and certainly not to know “whether to ally with this or that Gafa”.
Is that all right?
Nobody, whether it's retailers, real estate companies or investors, is really comfortable explaining today's figures, especially taking 2019 as a reference as if it were year 1 of the new era of commerce! Indeed, historical comparisons have been lost, erased by two years of the pandemic that make it impossible to measure the real health status of the protagonists, for those who are not already on the carpet. Not only have the figures, whether in terms of traffic or sales, not returned to “the previous level”, but they are constructed in such a different way that any comparison becomes risky and complicates the analysis, if not outright falsifying it.
This persistence in comparing ourselves to the world before shows above all the great uncertainty in which the players of this market are plunged, making all projections very uncertain. While all the diagnoses on the collapse of the old system have been made, the vision of tomorrow's world and the solutions to be implemented remain difficult to discern. Not only is the economic context making the situation even more tense, but the explosion that is shaking the world of commerce, commercial real estate and urban planning in general continues to spread. Without any sector being spared, it focuses on environmental and ethical issues, the explosion of the second hand, new proximities, the implementation of short circuits...
Admittedly, there is no shortage of “brilliant ideas”, the list of which is growing almost every day, to try to provide answers to these challenges! Everyone has their own delivery system (the Carrefour group currently experimenting with more than ten of them!). Others, capable of mobilizing gigantic funds, want to reinvent commerce by replacing it with dark stores, URWlaunch the drive to store... All solutions, which, as you will notice, rely on the store, which remains the linchpin of digitally enhanced strategies.
While this bloom of tracks is rich, the latter remain very (too much?) focused on “quick commerce”, placing logistics whose profitability has yet to be found at the heart of the challenges. Moreover, none of these ideas have really provided a clear answer as to the results to be expected in terms of performance, turnover, returns and, above all, profitability, which should justify the restructuring and investments to be made. Everyone is still looking for their economic model through a revised operating account in which the relative share of each item has been adjusted, starting with the share of logistics, the cost of real estate and the accompanying taxation.
In this context, we can only be surprised and concerned that so far nothing has been drawn from the Trade Conference, whose report and proposals are still awaited to help revive trade; it is apparently easier for some to decree moratoriums than to lay the foundations for a reorganization of a sector that nevertheless accounts for more than 3 million jobs...
The road to reconstruction is definitely still very long! This reconstruction requires the courage to project yourself, to look resolutely forward and to stop looking back, except to convince yourself that nothing will be the same as before.
Jérôme Le Grelle (ex-CBRE France) joined Mytraffic last March as Senior Advisor.