An End to ‘the Concrete Jungle’

I explain the ‘Concrete Jungle’ as infrastructure created around concrete in which customers use to acquire goods. I figured I’d explain my conceptualization of this term, today, after I closed the only bank-account opened, throughout 26 years of living, in a physical branch.

At the time when this bank account opened, I went into a branch, received a little ‘black-book’ where I could track the activity of the bank account, and often enjoyed going into the branch to have account activity updated via stamp. There was no online banking at this time, and most of the public didn’t trust anything we couldn’t see or touch with our own hands.

Fast forward to 2016. How many of us bank online? How often do you use a bank merchant to make a transaction? The fact of the matter is that we apply for mortgages, lines of credit, business loans, and do just about anything else we used to do ‘in-bank’ only online.

I foresee a future, not so far away, where 90%+ of purchasing is done outside of the traditional way to purchase products. This means that banks, retail chains, and any other concrete infrastructure is going to collapse, eventually. And the shift in purchasing behavior will happen quickly, across all industries, as Blockbuster found out the hard way: the expenses on all ‘Concrete Jungle’ infrastructure, the repairs, constant energy needs, and employee costs are extremely high, so if a fraction of the population stopped using these concrete jungles, to acquire goods, the infrastructure should collapse.

I think we’ll buy everything we need through our phones or computers in the not-so-distant future, and as more people adopt into this method, the online method will become more efficient (similar to what happened in the banking world) as our purchasing behavior shifts focus.

Extract this trend out, while looking at where most people are making purchases today and at the growing market share of online purchasing activity, and, even at a slower rate of growth to that of what online purchasing is experiencing today, 90% of us, in this future, are not purchasing in stores, if we follow the data.

The concrete infrastructure (the retail chain stores, etc.) of the ‘Concrete Jungle’ should collapse is what I am trying to point out here. If 20% of the purchasing market share, over the next 5 years, switches to online and away from acquiring goods in the ‘Concrete Jungle’, towards new ways of doing things, it’s not looking good for the companies that rely on their ‘Concrete Jungles’ to sell products.

I like to think of online purchasing companies, such as Amazon, as ‘Netflix’ and companies that have most of their purchasing done in-stores as ‘Blockbuster’, as an analogy to explain what is most likely going to happen in the purchasing world (and probably before most realize it).

With more people adopting into the online purchasing world, the shipping-rate and receiving time, as well as quality and overall efficiency in operations for customers, should increase.

Extract this trend, of ‘online shipping efficiency increasing due to market share growth’, 10 years from now and it’s not counter-intuitive to suggest we’ll have same-day shipping for over 90%+ of the things we need to buy today, food included, with the ability to send back purchases on the same day, if we do not like it, only for another product to be there within, or less than, 24 hours.

What I am saying here, in a ‘too long; didn’t read’ fashion, is that like the banking world, the majority of purchasing activity is going to move online and sooner than most of us imagine. The victors of this shift of consumer behavior will probably not be the companies who have dumped billions of dollars in infrastructure which may not be used, by the majority of customers, as soon as 10 years from now.