The Death Of Retail Is The Birth of Retail – Part 3…A Post Covid World… And More Gamestops?

Back in 2016 I wrote my first ‘Death of Retail Is The Birth of Retail‘ post and it had some good links and thoughts. I concluded to stay long $aapl, $amzn, $shop and $pypl. That was a good idea and I still own Apple, Amazon and Shopify, but I sold Paypal too early last year.

I have updated the series over the years and the whole process has helped me think through which companies/brands matter as ecommerce grew and retail changed.

Here we are in January 2021 and the end of COVID is in sight now that we have working vaccines so where are we with ecommerce and retail?

I like Elena Berger’s take:

The takeaway shouldn’t be “eCommerce is eating the world” it should be “despite lockdown, store closures, mass layoffs, and global logistics networks that rival militaries in terms of sophistication, eCommerce was less than one-sixth of sales in the US.”

Elena had a good essay I just read on the subject. You can read it here.

Web Smith follows it up with his take on the essay and the bubble that we had built in physcial retail with his post ‘The Forgotten Middle‘. For more with Web, I had him on my Panic Podcast this summer and he dropped some great knowledge on all these subjects.

As the physical bubble in retail gets reorganized and reimagined and the next generation of investors gets into stock picking, while the current generation of ecommerce moguls begins to think about taking their skills and applying them to beaten down retail brands and the influencer economy continues to explode (TWO great recent reads on that here and here)…look for more Gamestops.

The reimagining of retail, not just e-commerce, will continue to create venture style returns in the public markets for many investors.

Image by Lisette Brodey from Pixabay