Whether you love or hate the US tax plan, it appears that one group that will benefit a lot from it is US retailers. They get a double bonus: a lower tax rate, and also a boost from consumer spending.

For a lot of industries, especially tech, the questions around what companies will do with their tax benefits have focused on repatriating profits held overseas, bonuses for workers, and questions about whether the tax benefits will be spent on investing in manufacturing in the US, or going into executives’ and investors’ pockets through bonuses and stock buybacks.

For retail, we’ve already seen some companies go after employee bonuses – Walmart, most notably, with their ham-handed, uncoordinated PR 1-2 punch of giving out bonuses while laying off employees. We’ve also seen – and will continue to see – retailers who have not figured out their store strategy continue to close unprofitable stores. A tax break isn’t going to save stores that are old, outdated, in the wrong location, and/or simply not getting enough traffic to justify their existence. And that will mean more layoffs, no matter what.

US retailers mostly don’t have profits to repatriate, and they certainly don’t have manufacturing. But what they do have is a technology imperative: They must transform their enterprises to be more “digital “. That means breaking down the barriers between online and stores, that means granular inventory visibility and the ability to promise and move inventory wherever it needs to go. It means moving at the speed of the digitally connected consumer, and reaching her in more personal and relevant ways than ever before.

Retailers have needed to make a lot of these changes since the early 2000’s. But something always got in the way. Y2K, the first tech meltdown, 9/11, the Great Recession, PCI… Retail is a business of very narrow margins, and all of the financial whacks over the last twenty years have left too many of them leveraged to the point of extreme fragility, or at least just staggering along, trying to keep the ship afloat. Very few retailers have had both the appetite and the funding available to make the significant technology changes (some retail tech is old enough to legally vote and drink) that they need to be relevant to today’s shopper.

Well, that has changed. Not only can retailers expect a tax break, they have an opportunity with shoppers (who see their own paychecks benefit, at least in the short term) that they don’t get every day. If retailers don’t spend these benefits on investing in a modern IT architecture, it tells you only one thing: they have no chance at surviving the future.