I needed a pithy topic for this week’s newsletter, so to freshen my thoughts I went to Google and typed in the word “Retail. ” Even before I clicked on “news, ” results popped up that reminded me just how little laymen actually understand about our relatively simple industry.

The top three stories during the half hour I checked were that Ann Taylor’s parent company (Ascena) is on a Retail Death watch, someone named Sam Zell (a residential developer in NYC as far as I can tell) has declared that retail real estate is a “falling knife ” and then of course, the obligatory story saying the magic words “How One Investor Made a Fortune Picking Over The Retail Apocalypse. ”

I could spend this entire column explaining what’s wrong with each of those stories. For starters, if anyone knows of a single retail holding in Sam Zell’s portfolio, please let me know. Ascena was a bottom fisher and to the surprise of no one really, rolling up multiple unrelated failing retail brands into one company yields…one big failing company. But I’m not even sure if that’s accurate given lack of information presented on square footage of Ann Taylor vs. Gap: just total store count vs. total revenue. And the “picking over the retail apocalypse ” story tells us…wait for it…an investor actually made money buying retail stocks! It has made hundreds of millions of dollars investing in the retail sector! I’m breathless.

C’mon kids…isn’t it time we got real? This is getting so old.

Retail sales last holiday season increased at their highest rate since 2011. Year to date, sales are up another 4+%. With threatened tariffs looming, we could be in for turbulent seas ahead, but is that new news? No, it’s the OLD rules of retail. When prices rise, sales decrease. And in today’s world, where price has become a primary demand driver, will we be shocked to find that when retailers pass those tariffs along to consumers, (even as they keep their tax windfalls), their sales dampen? Of course we won’t. At least I won’t be surprised. Will you?

It’s also old news that companies heavily burdened by debt tend to fail. My first memories of leveraged buyouts date from the 1980’s. Asher Edelman was an activist investor who continually proved to shareholders that a company’s breakup value was higher than its market cap. I worked for one of the companies that died trying to keep itself alive after buying itself out with debt (leveraging against future revenues, if you will). The last year I worked at Morse Shoe in Boston, it made more operating profits than it had made in its entire history. Unfortunately the service on its balloon debt exceeded those profits by millions of dollars, and the company failed. When you cut through the noise, debt is a primary reason for Toys R Us’s failure today. Not declining birthrates, not Amazon, just plain old debt. It’s a sad and familiar tale.

Of course, none of this means that nothing has changed. RSR partner Brian Kilcourse is fond of saying that retail is a simple business: plan, buy, sell, analyze results…then rinse and repeat. That’s true, but the big change is the dialectic between time compression on the consumer side and time expansion on the retailer side. Or maybe it’s better to call it retail time stagnation.

Regardless of your opinion on tariffs, the truth is, in the US we source most of our goods a half a world away. As an industry, we place big bets because it takes the product so long to get here. And most sane people who place big bets also place safe bets. That’s a prescription for a boring assortment. We’ve been building to this point for 30+ years, and the final die was cast in 2005, with the end of apparel quotas. I remember writing a piece reporting that imports of socks and towels were up by 1000% within the first six months (no, that’s not a typo). Now, we even import a lot of the food that we also grow here. I don’t quite know how that happened, but this is not a story about that.

My Forbes compatriot Steve Dennis says that the new rules of retail are simple, “Don’t be boring. ” But how new is that, really? Who wants to be bored?

We read reams of stories written in the early aughts about how retailers needed to become more like the airline industry. Provide more self-service in stores….toss in more self-checkout machines and price-check machines while continuing to cut payroll. And now we’re talking about the “frictionless ” experience of store retailing without a checkout stand. Seriously? Why would anyone go to a store for that kind of experience, and how many retailers could afford the hardware and software required to create that sub-optimal experience, anyway? It’s BORING. In that universe, it would be better for all of us, consumers and retailers alike, if we all just bought online.

But that’s also wrong. People enjoy a shopping experience. I had my mind blown at Miami’s newest mall at Brickell City Place. I shopped. Tonya Harding did all her ice skating practice at a rink in a low-end mall in Portland back in the day. People also shopped. Long and short, it’s possible to please your customers and shareholders at the same time in an actual retail store location.

But the key imperative of the 21^st century is SPEED. Retailers need to become more responsive. They need to get faster. The industry simply needs to change. It’s time to respond to what shoppers want more quickly. That may mean sourcing closer to the point of demand. But I don’t advise passing any increased costs along to consumers. They’ll revolt.

And since I’ve mentioned airlines….I might as well close with a very recent and clear example of who we don’t want to be….United Airlines. A couple of weeks ago, a flight attendant killed a puppy by stuffing it in an overhead bin against the wishes of its owners. Why the other passengers didn’t come to the owner’s aid will remain forever a mystery to me. Regardless, the puppy died. No loud apology on social media ever came. Then the airline misrouted a caged dog from Kansas City to Japan. And then it routed another one to another arcane incorrect destination. Good God, what is wrong with that company? You would think they would be extra careful after killing the puppy.

No apology issued yet, but United cleverly initiated a new policy: they won’t fly dogs in cargo for the foreseeable future. Of course, people like me have initiated their own new policy: #BoycottUnited. It’s simple enough. You have not earned my trust and you have not exhibited even a modicum of regret. So carry on without me.

Retailers can’t afford to do that. It’s imperative to earn your customers’ trust every single day. That trust happens when we pay attention to them, when we provide solid customer service from knowledgeable employees or customer service reps and sell great products at reasonable prices. Plan, buy, sell, analyze…rinse and repeat. Just do it faster, because consumers are moving way faster than they used to.

It’s time to get away from gimmicks, click bait and chasing the ever elusive “Amazon experience. ” The new rules of retail are to merge the old rules of solid customer service with the new rules of “be quick to change and innovate. ” It’s not all that complicated. It’s retail.