What’s behind the slump in retailing?
Today it’s easier for the biggest players to get their hands on cutting-edge products. You can go to Best Buy or Amazon and find most of the same products that five years ago you could find only if you went to Sharper Image or CompUSA. Now the specialty retailer has to stay a generation ahead of the big-box stores. But product innovation goes in waves. When times are tough, there’s less money and less innovation. Have retailers opened too many stores? It’s very common. Wall Street pressures you to show growth. There’s a certain seduction to opening up more stores, because that’s an easy way to show growth. But in a downturn, you wish you hadn’t. It’s like overeating at Thanksgiving. Sharper Image was guilty of that sin. What happened at Sharper Image? One of the biggest challenges that Sharper Image faced in the past five years was that the Apple store took over as the place to hang out and play with gadgets in the mall. We were lulled into a period of complacency because of the succes
