Until recently, like many people, the name “Pitney Bowes ” brought an image of metered postage machines to my mind. I hadn’t really given the company a lot of thought since my days as a temp just out of college, who – more often than not – had to use one of those machines as part of my job.

Just recently, old friend Michael Griffiths (formerly of Microsoft, NCR and Toshiba) sent me a note on LinkedIn telling me he’d gone to work for the company and wanted to let us know what they were up to. We had our phone briefing and boy, was I surprised. And inspired. My trip to the company’s user group conference in Orlando (called (R)Evolution), last week only served to inspire me more.

Here’s the thing. Pitney Bowes is 97 years old. Just for context, I looked up the company on Wikipedia this morning. This is a company that has innovated throughout its history. Arthur Pitney patented the first hand-cranked postage-stamping machine in 1902, while Walter Bowes began providing stamp-canceling machines to the US Postal Service in 1908. In 1920, the two met, joined forces and created some powerful equipment to the USPS (and started the company!). The story continues and I encourage readers to take a look at the Wikipedia article to get a sense of just how forward-thinking the company has always been. For example, it holds more than 3,500 patents worldwide.

Today, the company’s specialty is enabling cross-border commerce with a full suite of analytics, shipment processing, payment processing capabilities, marketing, and consumer-facing web sites (through its acquisition of BorderFree in 2015). It holds to its roots by enabling retailers to find the least expensive international shipping option along with least cost domestic shipping.

This is important. All our survey data tells us that retailers, even small ones, are interested in going international and doing business in a variety of geographic areas. And doing that can either be an expensive or a seamless proposition.

In those regards, Pitney Bowes can support the world of retail from SMB all the way up to enterprise players and continues to make refinements and improvements to its suite of software and banking and payment management capabilities. I encourage you to take a look at their web site.

But there’s another message here, and I hope I can make it really clear. This is not a paean to Pitney Bowes’ technology. Here is a company that, absent continual reinvention and evolution, would be hard pressed to still exist. If retailers are to believe some of the blather we’ve read in the mass media over the past six months, they might be tempted to fold up their tents and go home. First there was Walmart. Would the industry survive? Well, of COURSE it did. Survive and thrive. Now it’s Amazon. Will the industry survive? Yes, it most assuredly will.

Amid the noise of thousands of store closings, there are a roughly equal number of store openings on the docket (thanks, Greg Buzek!) and guess what! When we look at Q1 2016 vs. Q1 2017, we see an actual growth rate of 4.1%. That’s not too shabby.

As I said, one big reason Pitney Bowes has survived is continual investment in new technologies and methods to support their business. Should the retail industry be doing the same? I understand that the “Street ” has its expectations, but if we’re honest, we know we’ve under-invested in differentiating IT capabilities for years, most especially in the store. I do believe that as an industry it is time for us to over-invest for a couple of years. We’re simply too far behind the consumer. These investments bear fruit, as Pitney Bowes illustrates.

I’m not going to name names, but we can easily think of another company that has been around forever, that is running what has been called “the world’s longest liquidation sale ” (thanks, Cathy Hotka!). We don’t want to be that!

Someone on LinkedIn made the mistake of tagging me in an article about “The Coming Retail Apocalypse. ” It got my blood going. His list of retailers closing stores fell into three different categories (too big, too slow, or out of fashion and out of ideas). These problems didn’t start overnight. It took literally decades for many to fail.

We each have a choice to make every day. Are we going to succumb to the winds of change, or are we going to ride them to a new destination? As retailers, I really believe our best days are still ahead of us. We just have to recognize that time has compressed….retail time, which used to be “really fast ” is now simply too slow. We’ve got to move faster, replace processes and technologies more often, and for God’s sake, differentiate on something other than just price. No one wins that game. Ever. No one.

I’m grateful to Pitney Bowes for reminding me that reinvention is not only an imperative, but it’s doable, and you can come out the other side better than ever. Innovation is not a moment in time, it’s a way of life. Retailers, it’s time. We have to grow, change and evolve.