I had the pleasure of attending the Food and Grocery Australia conference in Brisbane last week, hosted by the Australian Food and Grocery Council.  There was an excellent line up of speakers, including Joanne Denney-Finch from IGD based in the UK talking on future trends, Jim Flannery from the GMA USA talking on great er transparency in products, Craig Woolford from Citi and Bernard Salt from KPMG talking about retail trends, Yngve Andresen from Bain talking about Amazon, as well as senior executives from Woolworths, Coles, Metcash and Costco giving updates on their plans.  So what does the future hold for Australian Retail.  Frankly it is going to be very patchy with some rough times ahead.  As shoppers look for greater ease of shopping, more variety and more personalisation, so we will see a growing trend to shop on line and a search for better service.  Amazon’s entry to Australia will be very interesting, but will likely mostly challenge electrical/electronics retailers…and we might start to see the death of the large shopping mall – after all, who has time to browse when we can get all the facts we need on the internet which means we only go to a shop to make the purchase.  So a few predictions:

·      Amazon will make a difference, but it will take time

·      We will continue to see Retailer stress – a growing number of retailers struggling to make money, let alone grow

·      The days of big malls and department stores are fading – slowly

·      Online everything will grow – and so many of our retailers will be challenged as their online presence is terrible

·      Personalisation will continue to be a key differentiator – if only we knew how to do it at scale.

These are very exciting times for retail in Australia.  Only by investing in technology and service will retailers succeed.  It will be interesting to watch how this unfolds and who the winners will be.