At this year’s World Retail Congress in Paris, Alexandre Bompard, Chairman and CEO of Carrefour, spoke for most retailers when he said in his opening address that “our industry is facing unprecedented challenges. Dealing with crisis after crisis has become the new normal for us”.
Having spent the last few weeks speaking with retailers around the world about how they see their immediate business priorities to help Niamh Stone and I build the strongest possible agenda for next year’s World Retail Congress; this sense of perpetual crisis has only grown stronger. This really is a time of unprecedented challenges and something the retail industry has never had to face before.
Retailers always accepted that they couldn’t influence economic factors and just got on with the job. But over the last four years everything has now changed as we’ve had to face into a global pandemic, massive jumps in inflation, a cost-of-living crisis, supply chain disruption, global conflict, climate catastrophes and political turmoil with multiple elections around the world. All converging together just as retailing itself is facing enormous structural change.
If you were a political leader of a country, you would say this comes with the job. When asked what the greatest challenge for any statesperson was, the former British Prime Minister from the late1950s, Harold MacMillan, famously replied: “events, dear boy, events”. But that’s not what business leaders have been used to.
One major retailer told me that in looking back over their career, they used to believe that they could control or influence 70% of the business performance. Today, they said, this has flipped around completely.
So if this is the new normal for retailers, how should retailers adapt in order to survive? What we hear consistently is that doing nothing and battening down the hatches waiting for “normal” conditions to return is not an option. They simply aren’t. What the winning retailers are focused on is the need to build resilience, to move faster than ever before, to question how to do things better right across the business, to stay even closer to your customers, to take risks, to find the new and exciting and to rethink all established approaches.
As Alexandre Bompard went on to say in his World Retail Congress address: “we must be prepared to adapt at full speed because that is what retail demands……..the road ahead won’t be smooth but it is our role to navigate these changes successfully”. #wrc2025
