Experience Manifesto

They’ve Taken the Joy From Shopping

As you can see by the photos below, I recently decided it was time to make a change from the Covid beard I had grown this past year. I’ve had a beard mainly since I left Disney in about 1984, but hadn’t been clean shaven in about a decade. Because of that, the sudden shaving was really irritating my skin and I was getting a lot of razor burn.

So I decided I would try an electric razor and see if that helped. I did my research and deciding which one I wanted, started to go to stores to buy one. Holy smokers was it a frustrating experience. Shopping can be a fun, joyful experience and this was anything but. This isn’t about shaming any retailers as these experiences were pretty consistent across all of the big box retailers I visited in my quest.

Yes, I could’ve gotten what I was looking for online, but there are times when you want the immediate gratification of the purchase, plus I was still doing some comparison between different models and I wanted to do that in-store. Plus, I generally love actually shopping, being in the stores, wandering around, seeing what else I may want to buy. As I’ve written about here, stores didn’t run into trouble because of online shopping alone, online shopping was able to grow because in many cases the store experience just wasn't that good any more.

Some observations:

• Ordering-in-store. If I’m in your store, I’m not looking to buy it online. I could do that without coming into your store! I get that you could order it for me and, if I was asking for something unique, that might be really appreciated. But if I’m looking for standard stuff, that you have on display, I’m in your store to actually make a purchase right there.

• I get that theft has become an issue, especially in certain categories, like the shaving area. I can appreciate your need to limit theft, I really do. BUT, if you are going to lock things up and make me press a button to get help, then you need to have enough staff on hand to do that. Making customers wait 10 minutes to be able to start their purchase decision is 10 minutes too long. Most consumers don’t have the time or patience for that. And they certainly don’t want to feel like they’re inconveniencing your staff by asking for help to make a purchase. BTW, we have a solution to this issue, email Jim Ackerman to schedule a visit to learn more.

• It is inconceivable to me that in 2021, when retailers are so focused on consumer convenience, that equally as many stores still don’t have a proper indication of what a product actually costs! Holy smokers folks, that’s a key piece of information to the purchase decision, why are you hiding it? Also as important is to make sure the inventory is in the right place if you DO put prices. Customers can feel a lack of transparency when they take something on the shelf with a price associated to it only to get to the register and find out it’s different.
• I get it, hiring is hard these days. I mean, it’s shocking that people have finally decided that they don’t want to work for billionaire multinational corporations in low paying jobs with no benefits! I mean, who’d of thunk, right? If you’re a small, independent business, I will cut you some slack. But if you’ve been making record profits, my sympathy is gone. If I’m in your store, I at least expect that any associate there can tell me at least what department something is in. Far too many people I encountered could not answer very basic information about the store let alone the products. This is about customer retention and engagement! Each customer an associate “cannot” help, is a customer that leaves with a more negative image of the brand than they walked in with.
• As retailers discuss redesigning the front ends of their stores to maximize efficiency, I have a few thoughts from my experience today. I do self-checkout only when forced to do it. Unless I really only have a handful of items, it’s not usually my first choice. But watching people struggle with a shopping cart full of items, especially if they have children with them, is just painful. And, as smart as I think I am, I still have to look for the barcode every time. And we know that you didn't do this to make it a better experience for us, the consumer. No, you basically moved your labor costs from you to us. As different concepts emerge for newly designed front-ends, it’ll be interesting to see how retailers balance convenience for themselves vs the consumer. We’ll probably write about this one more in-depth, so keep your eyes peeled!

Many articles have been written about the death of the store but really the issue isn't that stores are closing, it's that bad stores are closing. My experiences yesterday really showed the challenges the physical stores are having. It takes so little for an experience to be either really good or really bad and almost all of my experiences yesterday sadly fell into the latter.

Yes, I did get what I wanted, but boy was it a painful process. I wanted to actually give a retailer my money and all I got was barriers to doing that. Shopping should be fun and for me it is. I'm spending money to get something I want or need, at the end of the experience, I should feel happy. I can tell you last night happy was the last emotion I was feeling and I actually got what I wanted. 

In the end, I got the Phillips Norelco Shaver 7500 and based on my experience shaving this morning, it worked pretty well! I got a smooth shave and my face wasn't irritated at all! Even my wife commented how smooth my face was! 

Movie Theaters Will Be Back

UPDATE

Was back at an actual movie theater this past weekend to see In the Heights. While the theater wasn't packed, it had a good crowd and we were certainly an enthusiastic audience. We had started to watch it at home on HBO Max and quite frankly, it wasn't at all the same experience as watching it in the cinema. It's not just the size of the screen, it's the entire experience. From the minute we walked in the door and got the aroma of the popcorn, to the seats and the screen/sound combination, everything is different. And the audience is far more focused on screen and the story in the cinema than certainly I am at home. It's why I am still bullish on the in-cinema experience!

Original Post

This has been a hard year for movie theaters, possibly their hardest ever. In October, Variety Had a dialogue on the future of theaters. Earlier this month, Warner Bros made news (and a few enemies) when it announced that it would release movies simultaneously on HBO Max and in-cinema on the same today. That effort kicked off yesterday with the launch of WW84.

As a little background on us as a movie family, we love movies! We went to the movies a lot, every week in the summer. I had the AMC Stubs A List and usually I made out pretty well with it. My wife & I did many a date night at the movies and my daughter and I made sure we were in the theater for every super hero movie that came out. You just have to watch those movies on a big screen!

Watching a movie in a movie theater is a completely different experience than watching something at home. At least it is for me. There’s a ritual to seeing a movie in a cinema. I only eat Sno-Caps in a movie theater, despite the fact that I can buy them other places. They get sprinkled into the popcorn to create a melted mess that’s awesome!

Seeing a movie in a theater with an audience also creates a group catharsis that almost never happens for me when watching at home. Part of the issue is the many distractions that I have at home that don’t happen in the theater. I’m constantly looking up trivia or checking emails or doing something completely unrelated at home. In the theater, I’m focused on the screen and the story. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been totally engrossed in a movie in the theater and sometimes even questioned how I thought I liked the movie when watching it at home. Or thought a movie was really funny when surrounded by other people laughing and then sat bored while watching it at home.

At some point today, I will admit that we will be watching WW84 and Soul here at home with the family. But honestly, only because it’s our only way to watch it right now. The smart move would be for these companies to bring them back to the theaters when they reopen later this year. I’d certainly pay to see them on a large screen in a darkened movie theater with my popcorn and Sno-Caps, surrounded by an audience all sharing the same experience.

Plus, I can assure you that my wife will never count it as a date night if we watch a movie at home.

Incident at Fran's House

My daughter, Sydney, is a sophomore at Bucknell and like many students, she has had a tough year. Between suddenly having all of her classes go remote, the food program being really hard (at least last semester) and the lack of social experiences, it's been a hard year for her. But one thing that was awesome, is her experience at her residence hall, Fran's House.

But last week, she had an experience that no one at college should have. Her house was attacked by a group of graduating seniors, members of a fraternity that had previously lived in the building that she now lives in. As reported on the Bucknell website:

As reported to Public Safety, a group of male students approached the house at 825 Fraternity Road, which formerly housed the Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE) fraternity until that group's removal two years ago. In the events that ensued, these men allegedly harassed and intimidated the residents of Tower House while attempting to enter the building. We note that TKE does not formally exist at the University, is no longer a recognized student organization, and is banned from campus operations. It is clear from multiple accounts that the students violated the physical space and, far more importantly, the residents' sense of place and security. Further, it is equally clear that Bucknell Public Safety's response to the incident was lacking in myriad ways.

Fran's House RA, Tyler Luong gave more details about what happened when the campus security in a note to the President of Bucknell:

When Public Safety arrived, they laughed at the situation. President Bravman, the officers bonded with our offenders, reminiscing their college days and calling them handsome young men. President Bravman, the two officers didn't even speak to me. Neither of the two officers came up to us Fran's House residents to ask if we were okay. AND THEN THEY PROMISED TO TALK TO THE CHIEF OF PUBLIC SAFETY TO GET THEM ACCESS TO OUR HOUSE WHEN FINALS WEEK WAS OVER, SHAKING EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEIR HANDS.

This was an outrageous act on the part of campus security, ignoring the victims while volunteering to do what they could to help the attackers. TKE was banned from the University and has no official presence at Bucknell at all. But that apparently didn't stop this group of people from coming back to what used to be their house and terrorizing the current residents. And make no mistake, that was their goal. To make the current residents feel unsafe in their home.

Not enough people understand what it is not to have a safe space. I certainly don't. I, like many other, live in a world where all of their spaces are safe. So we don't understand the big deal. I've seen the comments of people who said Hey, they were just being stupid kids, don't make it such a big deal. Someone on Twitter actually asked:

Ask yourself: Would you rather the world was run by these drunken louts or by the students who wrote these letters? I'd pick government-by-Neanderthal over government-by-Cultural-Revolutionaries every time.

Only someone who has lived their lives in constant safe spaces would even dare suggest that the world is better off being ruled by drunken louts over people asking to be treated equally and to have a safe space to live. It's amazing how many folks seem to think being held responsible for your actions is a cultural revolution.

Fran's House is an incredible haven. During this awful, stressful year for all students, my daughter has found a support system in Fran's House that quite frankly should serve as a model for all residential living at Bucknell. For that matter, every university should be thrilled to have a housing community like they have at Fran's House. We are grateful every day that Sydney has found her people who support and love her. 

While this attack has been terrible on so many levels, I would be remiss if I didn't commend the faculty/staff who created their own sign-up system to sit at Fran's House and let the residents know that they are loved and protected. When I arrived Friday evening, it was just so encouraging to see a dozen plus people, on the front lawn, there to protect all of the residents of Fran's House. And while I didn't stay there all night, my understanding is that there were people there throughout the night. The faculty/staff who both organized and were there should be the example for everyone on campus and they should be recognized publicly for what they did.

 

Every parent wants a safe college experience for their child. They should never have to worry about being safe in their own space and they certainly shouldn't be made to feel unsafe by campus security staff. This incident helped me to truly understand the need to have safe spaces for everyone.

 

At the end of the day, change will not come from those that need the safe spaces, but from those of us who've never even thought about needing safe spaces. Until we change, incidents like this will continue and those involved will never be held accountable for their actions.

 

I look forward to hearing what Bucknell will be doing so that my daughter never has to go through what happened last Thursday.

 

Official Bucknell response and the letter from Fran's House residents.

 

Articles about the incident can be found here, here and here among others.

 

The residents of Fran's House

CES 2021, 5G Is Here

Unless you've been on a deserted island (which honestly, might've been a good idea for the past year), you've no doubt heard of 5G. You might even have a 5G phone right now, there are a number of them on the market right now. 3G enabled the phones to start being more than a voice/text device, while 4G brought us the data opportunity that we've been living in for a few years now. Without 4G, much of what we do on our phones on a daily basis would not be possible, including watching content, maps, etc.

5G, as it becomes more widely available, will drive even more opportunities in our mobile/digital worlds. This report by Microsoft Cloud has some great stats for you to dive into! Some other 5G links:

• You can see the Verizon 5G keynote talk here.
• The CES 5G hub is here.
• Forbes Wrap-Up of 5G here.
• c|net panel on how 5G can help with Covid here.

• Location aware services/presence marketing. With the AR cloud and 5G, there will be really exciting opportunities. A few years back, I wrote about how Place & Information Will Change in an AR World to begin asking the questions about what happens when information is truly location aware.

Back in maybe 2012, I was out with a colleague looking for a place to eat. As frequently happens, you can easily get in a food rut, and we were looking for someplace new. We stood on a street corner going through Yelp, etc., looking for a restaurant that was actually across the street. Being able to place information onto the real world will become a very critical part of our futures. Think of the number of times you read an article on the best new restaurants in a certain town and how great it would be if that information could actually be overlayed onto that location the next time you visit. Or being able to see what your friends thought about a specific physical place while you were there.

But, bringing AR into our everyday lives brings up a number of critical questions:

• What's the UX for this new, AR world? Do we really want unfiltered and/or sponsored information overlaid on everything we look at? What's the new input experience for accessing this content? Will we use gestures, voice, eye movement? Take a look at what Alain Thys had to say about the future of UX and see what you think of his ideas.
• What is the backend for all of this content? Ori Inbar believes that it will be the AR Cloud that will drive the massive adoption needed to use AR as part of our every day lives. Information needs to be accessible in a very precise location for it to have value to the audience.
• Who will own this backend and be responsible for the massive amount of data that will need to flow through the system in order for it to be universally used? If I can only access data on one platform or another, that will make it hard for mass adoption to occur. I frequently say if TV had started like tech works today, and you needed a different TV set to watch each channel, there wouldn't have been a TV industry.
• Given how much of social media today has been taken over by trolls and haters, what happens to a society where that hate can live all around us, visually, in the real world? How will we clean up the AR graffiti that we know we cover the world? Who will make the distinction between art and garbage?
• How do we handle the right value exchange for the consumer in this connected, overlaid world? They know when the work we're doing is really only of benefit to us and they don't like it. We will not be able to force them to opt-in to this AR world unless they have a good reason.
• Entertainment. Sony showed off an awesome concert featuring Madison Beer during their keynote and it took me a couple of looks before I realized it was all CGI. With 5G, this kind of virtual experience will be available more widely. In fact, consumers will spend even more time on mobile devices to find the entertainment when and where they want thanks to 5G.

In addition, new forms of entertainment will be unlocked thanks to 5G. A number of years back during the Tribeca Film Festival, there was a demo of a new type of entertainment, where you had to walk around Tribeca to watch specific scenes in the places where they were actually filmed (I tried to find a link to it, but couldn't). The idea that you could walk around a city and have to visit different physical locations to experience a movie would be pretty cool.

A few years back, Sydney & I were at EPCOT Center and experienced the Kim Possible Adventure in the World Showcase. This scavenger brought Kim Possible to life and we traveled through the various countries that made up the World Showcase. Sydney & I had a great time and we saw a lot more of EPCOT than we might have otherwise.

• Sports and eSports. The in-stadium experience was being transformed before and Covid will speed that transformation along in sports like it has in every other field. From fan engagement to athlete training, 5G can impact almost all aspects of the sports experience. The NFL is testing 5G in stadiums, bringing player stats to the fan faster and in more detail than they can with existing infrastructure. Using technologies like AR, the field could come alive with all kinds of information. Inc. wrote about the use of 5G here and we're just at the beginning of where this tech can take us. You can als

VentureBeat gives some great examples here to show how the in-stadium experience will change with the addition of 5G. For example, the Sacramento Kings have built an entire virtual venue for guests to explore and see what their seats will look like. Speaking with ZDnet, Verizon VP of Network Engineering Brian Mecum said:

"We set up this 360-degree camera on the scores table, and what it allowed us to do was have the kids see the game as if they were sitting in a rare spot, and be able to put on the VR goggles ... they would be able to watch the game courtside."

From bringing the stadium experience to your home to enhancing the in-stadium experience, 5G will impact all parts of the sports experience. And this is simply building on what we already know to do. I have no doubt that we'll create immersive experiences that haven't even been considered yet as 5G is rolled out everywhere.

You can see my previous #CES 2021 posts here and here.

CES 2021, Day 1

So, the very first, virtual CES has completed day one and, I have to be honest, it wasn't nearly as much fun as actually being there! No doubt, it's really hard to get as excited about things when you can't really see or touch them. The second challenge that I've actually had with CES for a few years is that many times, the show is pretty incremental. In fact, this was was what I said when I reviewed CES in 2019. So we'll see what the breakouts are this year and whether or not it's more incremental than innovative. You can see all of my Tweets about this years CES here and my previous writing about CES here.

You may also want to read this piece, where I talk about some of the things I don't think will be trends, like 8K TV's, drone deliveries and others. It's not that I don't necessarily think these things will have an impact on the world, but I think they will not be big trends in the immediate future.

Now, there's a lot that I don't really cover, like all of the new laptops that were announced, although I personally want one of the new Surface Pro 7 Plus! I don't really talk about connected cars, there are more than enough people already covering them. One thing I'd love to see happen with connected cars is the ability to start planning at home online and then throw my plans to the car. I would also love to see branded drives. Put together some great day drives around key cities and tie it into my GPS. Once we get released from Covid, I'm pretty sure people would even pay for them!

So, what did I see so far today that got me excited?

• Rollable Screens. I'm pretty excited to see a number of companies rolling out (pun intended) rollable screens. For example, TCL has a prototype that can be extended from 6.7-inches to 7.8-inches with a simple tap of the finger, turning it from a smartphone into a tablet. LG also had a rollable screen phone, which might be out sometime this year. Of course, they showed off a rollable TV back in 2019, but for $87,000, it's probably not going to be available at your local Best Buy anytime soon. And here's what I said about it back then:

There's no doubt that this TV was a big hit. And it is both beautiful and cool, no doubt about it! People, myself included, would watch that screen roll up & down over & over again, sort of mesmerized by how it works. The picture quality is obviously excellent and the rolling mechanism worked extremely well. But I wonder how many people really need a TV that rolls away when it's not being watched?

Again, it might be cool in certain retail or OOH environments, I think it ultimately creates limited value for the typical home consumer.

And when LG showed it last year, it was at the end of a bed and the idea was that you would roll it up to watch it and it would be closed when it was down. In my house, that becomes a surface for things and the thought of having to clear it off everytime I wanted to watch TV would make me crazy!

Where I get very excited about this tech, however, is in its use in OOH and retail design. For so many years we've been bound by the rectangular shape of most screens and the fact that the screens are very rigid in that shape. With these new rollable/bendable screens, we'll be able to create all kinds of new environments, like these Illuminariums being done in partnership with Panasonic.

• Touchless Technology. For many years, retailers have been excited about putting lots of touchscreens in the stores/malls and now, thanks to Covid, we don't really want to touch them anymore. Thanks to gesture tracking technologies, we have new ways to engage with a screen. For example, Ultraleap has been doing great work in this area, with both gesture tracking and tactile feedback. We have some demos in the Lab if you want to experience them first-hand.
• Transparent OLED. Yes, these have also been around for a few years, but they do seem to be getting better and more practical today. I am not a fan at all of transparent TV's for the home. Not sure about your house, but I'm not really sure when we last cleaned behind the TV. And I don't really see the utility at home as well, especially for the anticipated price points. But once again, I can see great uses in retail and OOH. As you can see in this demo video, there's a lot that you can do with it in a retail or experiential setting.

I've gotten a few pitches today that certainly come under the "just because you can, should you" category. Like the LiDAR based showerhead, that uses the technology to turn your gestures into temperature control. Yea, I could see lots of challenges when I moving in the shower and those movements translate into temperature changes! I'm also not sure I can be excited about robots that will clean up after me. We just got a robot vacuum and we're starting to get it really set up. But a robot to put my dishes in the dishwasher? Not sure there's a big audience for that. And, sorry for all of the dentists out there, but also not really jammin' on connected tooth brushes, although maybe if I have grandchildren, I'll change my mind.

Tomorrow, I'll review some other categories, like senior tech and 5G, both of which I am pretty excited about. And I'll keep tweeting tomorrow with any announcements that happen!

Some additional CES reading:

• Digitaltrends
• Engadget
• c|net
• Wired

Some (Potentially) Unpopular CES Opinions

I've been giving tours of #CES for 10 years now, this is the first year that I'm not checking into a Vegas hotel today! One of the reasons I was brought in to give tours was to help separate things that would be trends from things I didn't think would be trends. While I've had a few misses over the years, I haven't done that badly. So, while most people are currently posting CES trends, I thought I would talk about some things that won't be trends, at least any time soon.

• 8K TV's. Truth be told, no one needs an 8K TV. The average consumer can see the difference be 1080 & 4K, but unless you're seeing the TV's side by side, you can't see difference between 4K and 8K. Secondly, while they certainly will come down in price, 8K TV's are still ridiculously expensive and without a compelling amount of content to watch on it, there's no consumer need. In fact, there's actually not much 4K content out there now. There's no reason to go beyond 4K. Thirdly, after spending billions in capex to upgrade all broadcast facilities to 4K, they're not spending the money to go to 8K. Especially being given that there's not a lot of 8K TV's to pump the content to. 8K and beyond is great for #OOH, but it will be the next consumer 3D.
• Self-driving cars. I have a teenager & believe me, I would love to have self driving cars, but we're at least a decade away from it happening. First, in order for it to really work, all cars need to be connected on same system. So, simple math: There are approximately 284.5 million vehicles registered in the US and we sell about 17 million a year. So it would take about 17 years to replace them all. Then, there's the entire ecosystem around cars today. For example, who does the insurance liability fall to? The consumer in the car? The car company that manufacturers the car? The self-driving AI software? It will take years just to answer that one question and there's are many others like that.
• Drone deliveries. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I'm not a big fan of drone deliveries. Sure, there are remote areas where delivery by drones might make sense, but it certainly doesn't make sense in suburban/urban areas. It's only real advantage is that it's cheaper than human delivery people.
• Slight improvements being touted as big deals. I've been giving tours for 10 years and year after year, we saw slight improvements. I even titled my 2019 review The Year of Being Incremental. Everything got slightly faster & smaller, more things got connected. Maybe missing this year will make next year feel like a real improvement.
• More Data, Less Help. There are lots of health & fitness tools out there helping me quantify, but not quantify. Sure, it can tell me I've met my step goal, but when will it help me adjust my goal because it's raining today? And how many ways do I need to track my sleep? I don't need more data, I need actionable plans!

I'm sure I'll add more throughout the week. So follow me to see what will be the real trends will be and what things everyone will talk about but will never really become a trend. LMK what you think!

Repealing Section 230 - What Does That Really Mean?

Repealing Section 230 has been a hot call this year, even hotter now that it's been tied to additional Covid relief in the Senate. And it's certainly been a hot topic for President Trump all year, even tied into his veto of the defense budget. But there's a serious amount of confusion about what 230 is and how it came about. So, let's start at the beginning.

Section 230 was part of the Communication Decency Act of 1996. Yes, a good 10 years before social media even really existed. It doesn't just protect social media companies from lawsuits coming from what is said on their platforms, it protects all platforms. The language is pretty simple:

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"

As the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) explains here, Section 230 gives broad protection from what is said on the internet to the carriers of that information:

In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content.

Hannah Cox also has an excellent review of Section 230 here, with some very good examples of what 230 protects and doesn't protect.

As I said in this Twitter thread, its protections go far beyond just letting Twitter/Facebook share fake news. Without Section 230:

• Conspiracy websites like Qanon, Infowars and even Michael Flynn's new "patriot" website could not be hosted.
• Hate groups would never have been allowed on the air/internet.
• Companies like OANN and Newsmax would never be allowed to start.
• Companies could be held even more liable for things it's employees said in email/Slack, etc., and would need to monitor your communications on those channels in a deeper way.
• Email providers might need to approve every email before it's sent.
• And Trump, who complains about 230 almost daily, would not have any platform to constantly lie about things like that he actually won the election.

I might not have a blog and, if I did, it might take days for someone to approve my content. Technically, 230 even protects you when you pass along that off-color email or make a racist comment about a coworker through an online channel. Think about what would happen to all the communication tools we use today, email, Slack, etc., if they were liable for EVERYTHING said on them.

These are just some of the examples of the way we're all protected by Section 230. The truth is, if 230 is repealed, it wouldn't actually solve the problem that people think it addresses at all. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc., might have the financial and legal resources to figure out a way to deal with a repeal, but there's not likely an ability for smaller companies or start-ups to be able to put in place the guardrails they'd need to operate.

The big issue with repealing 230 is that it only attacks one side of the equation, supply. It doesn't deal with the other side of the issue at all - demand.

Lots of folks want to believe in in fake news, misinformation and even hate. It doesn't matter how often we tag information as not being accurate or how much evidence there is against their position, they want to believe. Remember, there are people today who believe the world is flat and have to work very hard to keep that believe in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

At Sydney's school, they actually had classes in how to not only find information, but use critical thinking skills to determine the value of that information. That's not to say that we can't disagree of have different point of views, but there has to be a better understanding of the shared truths that we will hold as a society. We're nowhere near that right now and until that happens, everything is is IMHO pretty useless.

Repealing Section 230 is an easy and wrong answer to a much more complicated problem. Once again, without solving the underlying reasons, we won't really solve the problems we have as a society at all.

Retail as a New (Old) Third Place

American Girl Doll store, NYC

I was involved in a discussion on Twitter today and was reminded on the idea of the the third place. It was a topic that I used to write about about a great deal and with everything happening these days, guess it's kind of fallen off my radar lately. If you don't know the idea of the third place, it's this:

In community building, the third place is the social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place"). Examples of third places would be environments such as churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, bookstores or parks. In his influential book The Great Good Place (1989), Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.

When you look at how companies like Google, Facebook, etc., built their offices, I always thought they were built to really combine the second and third places together. For younger generations, so much of their social life was built around their work environments. For my Dad's generation, you worked and you mainly went home after work. During the dot com boom, they created offices that were for both work and socializing and the Google's of the world took it even further. You could do everything but actually sleep there.

Thanks to Covid, we're all working from home these days and while we talk a lot about how working from home is impacting our businesses, I haven't seen a lot of discussions about how working from home is impacting our social experiences. Yes, we know that covid has seriously impacted socializing right now, but even when Covid has left us, it seems like working from home is with us for the long term.

And that's where retail has an opportunity to step up. Back in 2011, I wrote:

We're missing a big opportunity to emphasize just what makes place special. As I've said in the past, I continue to think that there's a coming trend to socialize the retail environment instead of just merchandising the real estate space.

When Sydney was very young, we used to eat at a Burger King near our house quite often because they had an indoor playground. And it's not just about the actual playground. Since she's an only child, it was about Sydney's desire to play with a group of other children her age and the social aspect of that experience. It's not about the food there (sorry Burger King!), it was about it being a Third Place for Sydney.

So, what is the value of real estate for retailers today? If, thanks to the Covid and the internet people are much more comfortable getting their purchases sent to them, rather then getting them right away, do we need that much space dedicated to merchandise? So, if we can do away with the inventory portion of most retail spaces today, what else would you do with the space? How could you make it a much more social environment, rather than being a retail environment?

And if, thanks to the significant structural changes being made to our work structure, I think that there's a huge opportunity today. I continue to think that there's a coming trend to socialize the retail environment instead of just merchandising the real estate space. And the more we try to use the space for our purposes rather then our guests, the more they'll stay away.

Writing in their Dialogue, Gensler designer Kathleen Jordan talks about how retailers are adding to their experiences:

Familiar “ands,” such as a coffee bar or DJ booth, are commonplace. These added amenities draw from hospitality and are meant to personalize the retail experience and increase how much time consumers spend in a space—the “dwell time,” according to Gensler’s Kathleen Jordan. The right amenity doesn’t compete or distract with the product being sold, but offers a complementary use and a respite that allows consumers to recharge and extend their day.

Starbucks Reserve NYC

Starbucks is almost always one of the first examples given as a third place and their Starbucks Reserve is no different. I've had the chance to visit the original in Seattle as well as the location in Lower Manhattan, pictured below. With more menu choices and an actual bar serving alcohol, they are building on the environments that have driven them for years. Of course, in reaction to Covid, they are also building more drive-thru and pick-up locations., but they are not losing sight of what made them in the first place. A recent article in Restaurant Business about their efforts:

“As we started opening limited seating in our stores with very limited seating, it was immediate,” CEO Kevin Johnson told investors on Wednesday. “Customers were there. They want to be part of that community.

Back in 2017, long before we had ever heard of Covid, Retail Customer Experience had this to say:

Remember that for thousands of years the most powerful social experiences have happened where people gather. Whether it's a street fair or soccer game, a church or a coffee shop, people will always crave company. And what could provide a more engaging and social experience than shopping together? A show-stopping display, the big reveal as a friend emerges from the dressing room, an immersive installation — these occasions beg to be shared. The most compelling social media experiences begin with in-person social interactions.

As we wrote about here, retailers need to be thinking about their post-Covid strategy now, to be ready for when we get back to normal. I had the same challenges writing about the theme park industry right after 9-11. In the weeks after those horrible attacks, I spoke to many colleagues in the entertainment marketing field who all asked the same question: How do we go back to our business in the face of such a tragedy? What we do seems so trivial in the face of such tragedy…so unimportant. I, too, asked the same questions and wondered how I would get back to "business as usual" after these events.

Thanks to encouragement from industry friends and a great editor, Pat Esgate, I wrote a piece entitled The Great Good Places, where I talked about the important need to create fun. I wrote then:

As I thought more about it, the need for fun is a global experience. We may have fun in different ways, but we all like to have fun. Fun is one of the greatest tools we have to create a world of understanding and -- potentially -- peace. Hate can’t thrive in an atmosphere of fun.

Let’s ask how can we create experiences that bring people together to share a common, joyous activity. What we need today is more ways for people to come together and share joy—and that’s what we do. So celebrate the joy that you create.

Retailers now have a huge opportunity to recreate themselves for a new world. For 10+ years, I've been asking Why More Retailers Don't have Genius Bars and maybe this is the time to experiment and add new ideas. The large department stores that seem to be dinosaurs today, were once the forefront of retail experimentation. They were social experiences, where people gathered to be educated, to see the latest and to see each other.

The point is, that as consumers become continue to grow even more sophisticated in their expectations, retailers need to change their approach. I can shop online if all I need is shopping. I go to the store to receive service and I’m expecting more & more. Make my shopping experience my enjoyable. More helpful. More convenient. More of an experience.

If we do lose the office complexes that have been built the last decade or so, people will need new environments to be social and socialize. For decades, teens have used the mall as their socializing place, now more of us might be looking for a new place to hang out.

Retail can be the new (old) third place. As Ray Oldenberg said, third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place. Today, more than ever perhaps, we need our third places as a society and what better way for retailers to help than to be our gathering places.

Media Consumption Gen Z

During the Covid break, Sydney and I had the chance to speak with Alyssa Mullin from NUMA New York on a variety of Gen Z topics. In this section, Sydney talks about how they're using things like Instagram and, of course, TikTok. She also talks about her general media consumption and how right now, they're looking for things that make them feel nostalgic. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Media Consumption Gen Z from NUMA New York on Vimeo.

It’s the Little Things

It's 2020 and we're in the middle of a pandemic where people can't go out to eat in restaurants as we usually do. Thankfully, take out and delivery is booming!

So why do so many restaurants still not have their actual menu online??? Sometimes I can find the menu in pictures taken by guests and posted on Yelp or Trip Advisor, but the restaurant itself doesn’t have their menu available. This seems like such a simple thing to do to keep themselves going in these very challenging times. If I can't get this simple, basic information, how can you expect me to buy from you?

It’s always surprising to me how sometimes businesses miss the very simple easy things that they can do to make the sale. If you’re reading this and you own a restaurant, please make sure your menu is available!