On the way to visit the new Amazon 4-star store in Soho, I stumbled upon a Cartier pop-up at 120 Wooster (open until 11/4/18). Unexpectedly, I found both to be about discovery.

I'm not usually one to wallow in the doom and gloom angles of retail. But writing about an evergreen retail topic or recent store visit right now would seem to be ignoring the elephant in the dressing room. The 89,000 U.S. retail workers who have been laid off since October outnumber all of the people employed in the U.S. coal industry

For an increasing number of purchases, consumers don’t need to enter a physical retail store. It's why foot traffic is down: When consumers know they want to buy something, they often can do it online. 

Consumers need reasons to enter stores even when they don't intend to buy. Here's what I've seen drawing traffic recently and keeping visitors inside.

The store experience in Soho definitely lived up to expectations. And it’s definitely an experience more so than a store... The space is beautiful and not only brings the brand to life in a compelling way, but adds more dimension to the brand than could ever be conveyed by a web site or by the speakers themselves.

We’ve heard the doom-and-gloom about U.S. department stores. Yet, the retail community warmly received recent news of Anthropologie & Co., which is basically a department store. Why the optimism? Let’s take a step back and consider what made department stores appealing in the first place.