Last week I attended the ShopperTrak user conference. After first going to Manhattan Momentum to talk about the role of the store in the supply chain, thanks to ship from store capabilities, it made for an interesting contrast to attend a user conference where the focus was on store as marketing and commerce.

Overall, everyone at the ShopperTrak conference appeared to agree that the store isn’t going anywhere soon. But we quickly arrived at a point where it’s clear that the store as it exists today is not going to be the store of the future. As I said for my part on a panel session at the event, the store may not be dead, but it is in trouble. And the longer retailers wait to fix it, the harder it will be. Do I see a future where the store is made completely irrelevant? No. But if retailers don’t change the store’s current course, we might end up with more dead stores than we ever thought possible.

Here’s where the hard truths came in. I have three for you, based on what I heard at the conference:

Showrooming is a manufactured crisis.

Paula has been saying for a while now that showrooming isn’t nearly as bad as some retailers make it out to be. Her thought is that showrooming has been happening for years — it’s just that the mobile phone accelerates the process. I believe that while showrooming as a process began the day there were two retailers in the world, there is a difference between the shopper who is browsing and comparing, and the one who has selected a product and is now looking for the best price — the “cherry picking” shopper. I can buy into the idea that there are more of them than there were before, and it’s far easier for them to act than it has ever been. So I guess it depends on your definition of showrooming.

I have yet to see some real hard-core consumer research on the topic, but my hunch about showrooming (and why, in the end, even though my definition of showrooming is a little bit different than Paula’s, I agree with her conclusion) turns out to be the same point of view shared by Jerry O’Brien, the Director of the Kohl’s Center for Retailing Excellence at the University of Wisconsin: the only (main) reason that retailers get showroomed is because they are delivering a subpar experience that almost forces the consumer to pull out their mobile phone. Shoppers don’t come in with phones in hand, ready to compare (for the most part). What happens is the shopper is missing some critical piece of information and turns to her phone to fill the gap. And once that phone is out, all bets are off.

The retailers in the room appeared resistant to the idea that showrooming isn’t a real crisis. As part of his presentation, Jerry asked how dealing with showrooming is any different than dealing with a new competitor opening a store across the street. They responded with strong opinions that the cost structure of online-only retailers made competing with them somehow fundamentally different than competing with another store-based retailer. Jerry responded with an interesting statistic, put out by Google: when you add up the number of people who researched online before purchasing an item, 40% of shoppers who researched online then went and visited a store, but didn’t end up buying it in the store. They didn’t intend on buying it online, or they would’ve done so in the first place. So the store somehow didn’t satisfy their need. Showrooming, these days, is just a poor excuse for a bad experience.

Retailers need to think like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, not act like them.

Cliff Courtney, the CMO at retail-focused agency Zimmerman, made a passionate plea for retailers to get more serious about data —not just analyzing it, but collecting as much as you ethically can, and using it to better understand your customers. My favorite line: “Jeff Bezos [of Amazon] isn’t selling you stuff. He’s buying your data. He understands that a low margin sale today is worth less than the data-leveraged high margin sale tomorrow.”

Everything that a shopper does when interacting with a retailer is an important signal about what the shopper wants and needs. Retailers are beginning to understand that with their online sites, but for stores? There is a lot of unmarked territory on the map — and while traffic can certainly help you get to more valuable measures like conversion rate, that will soon no longer be enough. Retailers need to understand as much about shoppers in stores as they do shoppers online. And they need to be able to put that information together in a way that builds a holistic picture of their shoppers — and identifies ways to help enable their experiences.

Quit treating every store the same.

Speaking of conversion rate, here’s another hard truth: not every store is the same. Do you think that is a somewhat obvious statement? Well, I heard plenty about how retailers, already bought into conversion rate as one of the most important metrics for stores, are now spending money trying to validate the conversion rate they want to apply to each and every store in the chain. Store managers are being told things like “35% is your target conversion rate for your bonus” and they are pushing back on the measure by arguing about “purchasing units” and “shopping groups”, as in, “My store is in a tourist location so we have a much larger shopping group than everyone else.” As in, even though my traffic volume is the same, it’s made up mostly of large families where there’s really only one or two buyers in the lot of them — so my conversion rate target should be lower.

Talk about getting down in the weeds. Conversion rate should be validated against the revenue target. If a store is hitting the same revenue as a store the same size serving a different demographic, and it manages to do it with a lower conversion rate, do you care, as long as that conversion rate is holding steady or improving? It seems to me this is a lot of contortionist exercise just to validate treating every store the same — when we all know that stores will never be the same across a chain, no matter how hard you try.

Take this to a strategic level, too. While there is always a consistent brand proposition that must be maintained, every store should be viewed as the hub of its own community. Every neighborhood is different, every store’s demographic profile is unique. Incorporate local tastes and preferences into the mix, and the more a retailer tries to make stores all the same, the more they’re killing some of what makes them unique — what gives stores their personalities. In line with understand as much about your customers as you can, the more you can apply that knowledge in unique ways at the store level, the more of a differentiator you have from those low-cost online pureplays.

Store employees can’t continue to play the role they play today.

This one is a tad more controversial, but I can’t get around it. Jerry at UW holds the same philosophy, and for me, it was like finding a long lost brother when it comes to this topic. Stores are not about products, not anymore. Only on rare occasions do I go to a store for a product I can get just as easily online. And if the purpose of the store is no longer mainly about acquiring products, then what are they there for? Well, they’re there for service — they’re going to need to be there for service if they want to survive.

But $8/hour doesn’t buy you much service. Jerry put it like this: “If you treat employee like monkeys, you’re going to get what you pay for.”

Retailers might argue that they’ve already “optimized” the heck out of labor, and can’t really do any more. What they mean is, they can’t cut any more. Well, I believe they have achieved a local optimization only — if they would only invest in employees, they might find that the marginal return on that investment is much greater than the marginal return they got from cutting labor in the first place. There are plenty of retailers and service businesses that prove the point, but somehow they never get the credit — Container Store, Costco, Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom’s.

If you want to keep stores relevant, store employees need to be experts to compete with what shoppers can do for themselves, and no amount of technology is going to turn a poorly trained employee who barely gets enough hours to justify showing up to work in the first place — with no health insurance, no pension savings plan, and apt to be sent home if it’s slow or outright “descheduled” because they’re just not as flexible as the retailer demands — into the kind of customer service provider that builds loyal customers for life. In all of the future possibilities for the store, the role of the employee promises to be the most disruptive change of all.

I had an interesting choice this last week — I had to choose between ShopperTrak’s conference and Internet Retailer’s IRCE. Aside from the fact that Steve already had IRCE covered, I could easily see the choice as one between two alternate futures — one driven by stores, and one by online.

I’m a retail analyst. I want to be where the most disruption is. For the foreseeable future, that’s definitely going to be the store.