For whatever reason, some of the strongest memories I have from my freshman year high school history class (or as we called it back then, “social studies “), were those that involved late 19^th century America. For starters, I had a great teacher (shoutout to Dr. Smith), but just as importantly, the notion that such vast numbers of impoverished immigrants – my own family included – descended upon New York in such a short period of time fascinated me: it was just so much closer to home than any of the ancient cultures we’d studied up until that point. And let’s face it: it can be hard to get a 14 year old to pay attention to pretty much anything.

But the other day, as Paula and I were going over the results of our pending eCommerce study, I was reminded of a concept that I’d learned about all those years ago, and it struck me how much it applied to what we’re seeing in retail today.

As you may recall, the promise of New York in the late 1800’s was that it was to be a great “melting pot, ” a place where all cultures would collide, collaborate, and coexist. Cultures from all over the world would contribute their foods, customs, languages and art to something new: something everyone could share.

Only that didn’t happen. Most historians prefer to refer to New York (and to the same extent, America) as a “mixing bowl “: a place where ingredients co-exist, but not blend. Other commonly used terms are “salad bowl ” and “mosaic “, but regardless of the words, the concept is the same: people live alongside one another, but for the most part stick to their own kind. As a result, New York became a patchwork of neighborhoods, often times easily identified by one or two dominant ethnicities. For a lot of us, we’re still waiting for the places we live to become more like a true melting pot.

But here’s the thing: retail sort of has. Yes, retailers still tend to run heavily siloed operations. And yes, we conduct multiple topic-specific research reports each year at RSR. It’s how we – and our readers – are able to keep certain areas (pricing, loss prevention, business analytics) separate from one another and in doing so, keep the conversation focused and meaningful.

But as consumers blur the lines with how they use technology to shop, it’s hard to conduct a store report without talking about mobile. In our upcoming eCommerce report, a lot of what retailers tell us they need to do to compete with Amazon online involves store-based activities. And it’s damn near impossible to talk about marketing without talking about the merchandise that’s being marketed.

Retail really has become a melting pot.

I’m not trying to coin a phrase here. My goal is not to hear people referring to “melting point retail ” or worse yet – “MP Retail ” – in webinars and at conferences. I understand that we’re all still looking for a better term to describe channel-agnostic retail than “omni channel, ” “multi-channel ” or “channel-less, ” and I hope someday we find it. However, melting pot is not that – it’s just an observation that felt worth making.