We’re about to do something pretty different here at RSR.

If you’ve read our benchmark reports (and thank you if you have), you know we aim to stay as pragmatic as possible. We identify a sub-topic within retail (the store, the supply chain, etc), survey retailers to find out what’s keeping them up at night on that given topic, and then explore all they tell us through the stages of our proprietary BOOT Methodology: The Business Challenges, Opportunities, Organizational Inhibitors and Technology Enablers associated with that topic. It’s a process that’s worked very well for nearly two decades now, and we’re incredibly proud of the insights we’ve brought to the industry we care about so much.

Some wild events have occurred during those two decades. Mobile phones became not just a thing, but everything. The global financial crisis of 2008 happened. Wars have come and gone, natural disasters have wrought chaos and a global pandemic virtually shut down the world.

Yet throughout all of that, we’ve never done a report solely focused on how crazy things have become. We’ve always maintained a topic-specific focus. Sure, our Store Report in 2008 dove into the effects mobile devices would have on store shopping (as has every store and workforce management report since), and our BOPIS Report in 2020 took a severe turn when COVID-19 forced every retailer to start accepting online returns in store.

But we’ve never done a report specifically focused on what retailers are supposed to do – at a macro level – until now.

Without getting political in any way, we believe the retail world is in such a state of turmoil that it is difficult for retailers to envision what their operations will look like 6 months from now. Instead of a singular disruption, a seemingly endless series of geopolitical, economic and weather events face the world.  These events affect the very basics of how retailers have predicted supply and demand for years.  If that is true, how can retailers possibly plan what to buy and where to sell it six months from now?

In short: Is the sky falling, or is this just a passing storm?

We want to know, and we’re going to ask retailers – in an anonymized fashion, of course – to weigh in.

Our goal is to determine if retailers perceive this to be just another disruption or something very different.

Do retailers feel upended by an environment where dramatic tariffs may take effect on broad swaths of goods and materials on short notice? How will mass deportations affect their supply chains? As we head into dryer months, what would another summer of wildfires and storms mean?  Natural disasters have become an indelible and seemingly endless part of life. The list of challenges seems endless, but chaotic is the best word we can find for the situation.

As stated, this report will reflect no political bias – it will focus entirely on the business implications of the real-world changes happening in today’s marketplace. How are the best performers reacting and preparing differently, and what are their plans to leverage the newest breed of data and analytics technologies to best these challenges – as well as the more typical disruptors they’ve been battling like weather, changing regulations, and workforce availability? We will query approximately 100 North American retailers using our proprietary BOOT^™ Methodology to find out.

To make this report even more compelling, RSR Managing Partner Paula Rosenblum will be coming off sabbatical to co-author the report. It will be the first RSR report she pens since 2021.  

If you’re interested in learning more – or have some suggestions on points you think we should prioritize – please reach out! This promises to be an exciting project, and we want to make sure we get it right.