Retail stores are at a critical moment in their long and storied history. Not only are there still too many retail stores, (mass closings fill the headlines fill the headlines these days), but even worse, the lion’s share of today’s stores are relatively uninteresting. The 21^st century is nearly 1/5^th over, and today’s stores still basically resemble what they looked and felt like at the turn of the century. Meanwhile, leaps and bounds have been made in the online realm to make that shopping experience more interesting and, just as importantly: more convenient.

As a result, the urgency to modernize the in-store experience for the consumer is more pressing than ever, and it’s an issue we’re not afraid to keep pushing. So for example, when we conducted our annual Store Report last year, we were delighted to see that retailers overwhelmingly agreed: consumers are demanding better.

So this year, when we set out to conduct our 2016 Store Report, we wanted to know not just if retailers think the store is in need, but exactly what they plan to do about it. The first thing they told us is they are certain that technology in the stores is needed to help them compete with the online experience and that without it: stores are going to steadily degrade into irrelevance

What’s also interesting is how little retailers in aggregate believe in their actual ability to undergo this necessary change. Consider that 63% of our survey takers say their existing in-store tech is incapable of being “futurized, ” and another 38% flatly believe that even if they could, the goalposts for what constitutes a widespread in-store technology success are just too high.

What this all adds up to is a prescription for inaction – or worse: panicked reactivity. Customers are demanding stores feature more exciting and convenience-based technology, retailers know their store traffic and sales will continue to decline if they don’t do something about it, but they don’t have enough faith in their technology infrastructure to please their customers or their investors.

We hoped these sentiments wouldn’t be representative of all this report’s findings, and luckily: they aren’t.

To begin with, we are encouraged when we look at this same data through a different lens. Retailers who are already having more success with sales (Retail Winners) are far more likely to see the advantages in modernizing stores, while their underperforming peers are more likely to show pessimism for their ability to meet 21^st century challenges.

But there’s a lot more “good news ” than that, and we unearth a great deal of it in our 2016 report, The Retail Store: Poised For Transformation. We hope you take the time to give it a read.