Did We Miss the Historic Retail Tipping Point?

Nailed it. Take a look at this January 2014 piece from A16Z's Jeff Jordan. Nearly everything - but for maybe a Nasty Gal reference - has continued to play out exactly as he indicated back then. This is, in part, why PETITION is spending a lot of time looking at what the people on the front-end of companies are saying and doing - rather than being reactionary, as the restructuring industry often tends to be. Notably, the e-commerce outliers he identifies are still holding: "food and beverage" and "health and personal care." But the former is under siege. The latter has held strong - Ulta being a real success story - but maybe that, too, is just a matter of time. The bottom line is that this retail trainwreck was entirely foreseeable. Perhaps just not by the management teams at the helm.