The past months have led us to the pounding of the “retail apocalypse ” media drumbeat. This was followed by a truly bizarre piece of research quoting “7 million jobs at risk due to automation ” (among other pieces of wrongness). I’ve chosen to re-use a piece I wrote for Forbes on the automation job losses, but that wasn’t the end of it. Now, I’m taking press calls on new estimates that “25% of malls will be closing. ” Argh.

The problem with the retail store closing and mall closing stories is it’s a bit like publishing death statistics without considering birth statistics as well. Stores are opening, malls are being re-purposed and expanded, and just in my home town, two new malls have opened (Brickell City Center and the ever-under construction Design District) with another enormous one planned for Western Miami-Dade, meant to be bigger than even the Minneapolis Mall of America.

That’s all separate from the 315,000 square foot expansion underway at the Aventura Mall.

So perhaps I’m being Pollyanna here, but I’m just not buying the paradigm. Thinking about stores, I have to ask: What about Ulta? Warby-Parker? H&M? Zara? Lidl? Aldi? I can give you a long, long list.

And does anyone seriously believe that we’ll all go to stores to use self-checkout and talk to robots? I sure don’t. So right or wrong, what follows is the post I wrote on what I could also call “The world’s single worst retail report… ever. ” And how the media extracted only one of dozens of bogus statistics to create new click bait.

When did fake news become a thing? And how did the retail industry find itself in the middle of it? This month, we’ve been subjected to “The Retail Apocalypse, ” news that Sears’ problems were all the fault of the media and this week, to quote John Oliver “Now this. “

Go into Google or the search engine of your choice, and type “retail automation ” and click on “News. ” There you will find several pages of articles declaring things like “Retail Automation Threatens 6M-Plus Jobs, ” or my particular favorite (since it also refers to the retail apocalypse), “A Jobs Threat Worse Than Mass Store Closures Could Fire More than 7 Million Retail Workers. “

That’s a lot of stories, and some catchy headlines. It’s also complete nonsense.

After I received my fourth press call on the subject, I figured I should get back to the source and see where the click bait was coming from. I found it. It’s a study commissioned by the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute and written by Cornerstone Capital Group.

I trudged my way through 45 of the 56 page “study, ” so you, my friendly reader, don’t have to. I’m not going to mince words here. It looks impressive with lots of words, charts and quadrants. It’s also an awful and self-contradictory piece of work.

Here’s the overarching assumption in a nutshell:

Retailers are going to invest so heavily in automation that ALL sales people and cashiers are going to become obsolete. That’s right, all of them. In fact, of the 7.5 million jobs that are ostensibly at risk, 2.78 million cashiers have a .97 (out of 1) probability of being computerized and (wait for it) 4.19 million salespeople have a .92 probability of being replaced by a computer.

That would make for one spectacular retail apocalypse. There’d be nothing quite as customer friendly as walking into an empty store, being greeted by robots, talking to robots, and finally having some kind of automated checkout experience. Where do we sign up?

To be fair, some of the concepts make sense: they’re not new, but they make sense. Retailers have to choose between a great customer experience and convenience as their core value proposition. That’s true. Retailers make that choice when they start their business, not when they’ve already built out their model. If you walk into a store and see a long row of check-out stations, you know that “convenience ” is the goal. Think grocery stores or mass merchants, or even Convenience stores. If you walk in and see a few cash registers and helpful salespeople, you know that “customer experience ” is the goal. Think Nike, Microsoft or Apple stores.

That’s about as much sense as I could make of the report – retailers will get around their upward wage pressures by spending boatloads on automation. There are also some spurious charts on various kinds of technology adoption, but there’s no need to go into that here.

Most of the data the piece sources dates from 2014-2015 and much to my chagrin, my company RSR Research was actually quoted on page 30. (Note to the authors…our work is supposed to be sourced by permission. Please read our terms of use. But I digress).

Back in 2015, my partner Brian Kilcourse wrote a piece about the dilemma retailers face in managing what’s called “click and collect ” – where customers expect to buy something on line and pick it up in the store. He suggested that retailers have three viable options:

• 1)Charge customers for additional services (he knew that wasn’t going to happen)
• 2)Spend more on labor (something that actually IS happening, particularly among over-performing retailers)
• 3)Find the labor to execute the new tasks (a retail tradition…keep adding more work for stores)

The data we’ve uncovered in ensuing two years tell us retailers are indeed adding payroll into their stores. Option 3 has proven to be a failure as state governments crack down on last minute scheduling and other ways retail employees have been squeezed. So I don’t see those cashiers and salespeople going away any time soon. If anything, retailers will need more administrative help to fill those orders, not less.

Yes, retail store workers are underpaid. There’s no doubt about it. And yes, because so many of them actually live below the poverty line, they also get government assistance. So US Taxpayers are already subsidizing some of the world’s largest retailers. But retailers are also notorious in under-spending on technology.

When I walked through the study with some fellow analysts, everyone laughed at the notion of retailers spending that much working capital to completely replace workers with automation. Retailers spend, on average, 2% of their annual revenue on technology. The rule of thumb used to be .75% of sales, but that didn’t include communications costs…so I’ve bumped the number up. That’s not going to buy a lot of robots. In fact, it also hasn’t bought enough technology to keep up with today’s consumer, and that’s the nut of retailers’ store problem.

Click bait will continue. But we don’t have to believe it. There’s a new study about something coming out every fifteen minutes. Some of it is good. Some of it just isn’t. This particular study is the latter.