January / February 2017

As in, who's going to drive it—retailers or customers?

While there can be plenty of debate about the vitality of the U.S.

The retail industry continues to experience dramatic change, with technology and shifting customer demands creating significant challenges and unprecedented opportunities. This is especially true in the dynamic world of supply chain where five macro trends are unfolding. They include:

President-elect Trump has not previously held a government leadership position, so we have no experiential basis from which to forecast how he will govern.

Amazon's announcement of a new pilot program that offers customers a boundary-less experience for shopping and checkout is justly being positioned as a game-changer for the food retail industry and greater retail supply chain.

I've always posited that food should be more like fashion. Similar to the latest trends in lapels and color palettes, consumers' palates are attuned to what's hot in the food world.

More recently, Google's DeepMind, christened AlphaGo for a tournament of Go (described as exponentially more complex than chess), beat a human genius from Korea in a championship tournament.

Food-at-home prices in 2016 are predicted to reflect a 0.25 percent to 1.25 percent decline, according to the USDA Economic Research Service, making the past year the first time since 1967 that retail food prices reflected annual deflation.