The future of retail is stores that aren’t stores

In a less intuitive outgrowth of a company’s core business, the Philadelphia-based retailer Urban Outfitters announced in 2015 that it’d be acquiring Pizzeria Vetri, a beloved local restaurant chain. Investors were initially baffled—Urban’s stock declined sharply after the announcement—but the idea is that pizzerias might be placed near, or even in, the stores. “Now you can order a sofa on the internet,” Marc Vetri, the chain’s founder, told Bloomberg, adding, “if you want to eat at the hot new restaurant, you have to leave your living room and you have to venture out.”

This is exactly the thinking that more retailers should be experimenting with as they adjust to the buy-anywhere reality of the internet, according to Oliver Chen, the head of retail and luxury equity research at the investment-research firm Cowen and Company. Two questions he says retailers are asking are, “What are modern consumers enjoying doing, and then how can retail solve into that experience?” And “that experience,” he says, usually means “eating and drinking and working out and concerns about health and wellness.”