So, first off, I think I owe a public apology to Kevin Swanwick of Manhattan Associates. I was on a panel at Future Stores in Seattle, of which Kevin was moderating. And I behaved badly.

The truth is, I sat in the audience all morning before our panel session, and the more I heard retailers speak, the angrier I got. In between sessions, there were little mini-speeches (read: advertisements) from the sponsors, and too many people got up and opened with the idea that stores aren’t going anywhere.

I couldn’t help feeling like I was watching all of the political talking heads pontificating on one Mr. Donald Trump. “Stores will never die! ” sounds an awful lot like “Trump will never be the Republican nominee! ” And I realize I’m standing on the border of mixing politics and business, but love him or hate him, you can’t deny that an awful lot of people have spent an awful lot of time claiming that he would never be what he presumptively is today.

And the more that retailers and industry participants say “Stores will never die! ” the more I feel like they doth protest too much.

Don’t get me wrong – I have a soft spot for Future Stores. Back when WBR was contemplating the show, I encouraged them to go for it, because there just isn’t another conference like it – focused on stores. I’m in no way blaming them for producing bland, sanitized content, like how hand-crafted wrought iron fixtures somehow express the elan of a brand. It’s not their fault, it’s retailers’ faults. They are the ones who refuse to talk about the hard questions facing the store today.

Which meant, by noon at the conference, I was simmering. The audience was sleep walking through the most important opportunity to discuss the future of the store of that week, this month, maybe even this year. And when I got my turn to have my say, I maybe was a little animated about it.

So, pundits who claim the store will never die, you are correct. The store will never die. But if retailers keep on believing that this means they have no imperative to change how they think about stores, the role stores play in the shopping experience, the economics of stores, and even more fundamentally, how much transformation is coming to the retail business, of which 90% still does indeed happen in stores, then stores won’t have to die, because retailers’ oblivious self-congratulatory ignorance about stores will kill them all off.

We’re already seeing exactly how fragile the store is. Sure, Macy’s can blame the weather. But the cold hard reality is that Macy’s has been leading the charge in omni-channel and they’re still vulnerable. We’ve watched Millennial demands for relevancy practically wipe out the teen retail category, and mainstream retail is next. Take Toys R Us – the last category killer standing in toys – as soon as Millennials have kids, that miserable store experience will bring down that company, unless they do something drastic which I highly doubt they will.

What’s wrong with stores? Let me count the ways:

• They’re too big
• They have too much inventory. I didn’t realize just how much store inventory has changed over the years until I went to a local Army Surplus store and saw just how much inventory they had. Stores have trimmed down a lot compared to that – but they still have too much.
• They have too few employees who are capable of providing “live customer service “. Why do I need to go to a store to be ignored by employees, when I can experience that much more pleasantly in my own home? On my own terms?
• They are designed for an obsolete shopping experience – one where the shopper arrives as a blank slate, waiting to be influenced by those hand-crafted wrought iron fixtures, because there certainly won’t be payroll hours for employees to have any influence. Stores are now just one part of a much larger experience. But they’re not designed to accommodate that experience at all.
• They are designed to provide obstacles to the shopper experience, rather than to enable the customer experience. Why is the milk in the back of the store? To make you walk through the whole dang place to get the one thing you came there for. The longer you stay in a store, the more you are likely to buy something. This is the antithesis of the thought that goes into something like the Amazon Dash button, where reordering is so easy, you literally have to push one button to make it happen. Hmm, I wonder why that is? Could it be that Amazon is differentiating on convenience? Making stores look bad compared to the ease of a button to get what you need?

Stores are in trouble, people! The store of the future will not look like the category killer big boxes of today. They simply cannot. The economics of omni-channel won’t support it. You can stick your head in the sand and point to charts that show 90% of retail still happens in the store in the US. But the economic model of the store today is already taking out the weakest in the industry – Sports Authority being the latest casualty. So sure, some stores will survive. But will they be YOUR stores? If you don’t think the store is in trouble, then I’m pretty sure it won’t be your stores that make it. Am I passionate about preventing that kind of future? You bet.