Retailers, take back your shelves

Over the past generation, stores lost their individuality, becoming homogenous and undifferentiated in their product assortment, price, and promotional offers. Virtually nothing was left to define one retailer from its competitor across the street; it was said that you could drop a customer into virtually any major supermarket and she wouldn’t be able to tell which one she was in. Even more telling was the fact that it probably wouldn’t matter to the shopper, because it all looked and felt the same.

A major factor in this lack of personality came when stores began selling space for advertising. It didn’t take long before more than the products on the shelf looked identical; there were identical ads on the shelves, carts, floors—you name it—across competing stores nationally as major CPGs saw a more efficient method to advertise.
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