Starbucks Chairman: “We Took A Walk On Madison Avenue. It Reminded Me Of The Financial Crisis In 2008”
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Fri, 03/23/2018
Back in June 2009, in one of our earliest posts in the aftermath of the financial crisis, we took a “random walk down Madison Avenue” and found empty storefront after empty storefront after empty storefront.
In retrospect, the ghost town that was New York’s “Golden Mile” was not surprising: after all the US economy had just been hit with the worst recession since the Great Depression, and only an emergency liquidity injection of trillions of dollars prevented a global financial collapse.
What is more surprising is why nearly 9 years later, at a time of what is supposed to be a coordinated global recovery, a walk along Madison Avenue reveals the exact same picture.
But don’t take our word for it: here is Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz speaking during the company’s annual general meeting on Wednesday, and making some stunning observations.
From the transcript:
… let me shift just quickly into the business a bit and what’s going on in terms of the seismic change that we’re all witnessing in terms of consumer behavior in Retail.
No, I wasn’t clairvoyant three years or four years ago, but I did notice something and you didn’t have to be a genius to figure it out that the e-commerce effect of things was going to have a dramatic effect on people physically shopping for goods and services. And that has resulted in a tremendous level of compression in terms of the amount of retailers that are serving customers today because less customers are coming into their stores and that has resulted in unfortunately many, many stores national, regional, and local going out of business.
Now this is a photo as you can see of a mall that is very, very busy with people shopping for goods and services. Unfortunately, that was then, this is now. And it’s a dramatic change. And what it means and you saw this today and what we’ve tried to present to you is that we’ve got a push for reinvention and innovation and we have to do – everything we can to become a primary destination.
The Rest…HERE
