Are you Amazon or Sears?
by. Henry Meier
The blogosphere lit up recently with pictures depicting dilapidated Sears stores in New York and New Jersey with empty shelves and stained carpeting. They were the type of pictures you’d expect to see in Communist Russia. The informative thing about them, though, isn’t what they say about Sears but what they say about the need to innovate and the dangers ahead for credit unions.
As explained in an excellent article in this month’s Atlantic, today’s dying Sears was the 19th Century’s Amazon.com. As the article explains, “in the late 19th Century, soon after a network of rail lines and telegraph wires had stitched together a rural country, mail order companies like Sears built the first national retail corporation. Today, the Sears catalogue seems about as innovative as the pre-historic hand saw, but the 1890′s ‘consumer bible’ popularized a truly radical shopping concept that mail would bring stores to consumers.”
As late as the 1980′s, Sears was still a retail giant, but it didn’t react quickly enough to the Internet, providing Amazon.com the opportunity to build the ultimate Sears catalogue. Now, instead of having to wait for the catalogue to come through the mail or even visit a store, just turn on your computer or tablet, and within minutes your product will be on its way.
Credit unions are in an industry facing upheaval as rapid and as serious as the technological tumult that has brought Sears to its knees. When I hear credit unions talking about building a new branch, or read an article about how to attract members to your lobby, I cringe. If your credit union wants to be around for the next generation, now’s the time to be investing in technology and generally rethinking what it is our members want and how they expect to get it. Incidentally, this is not necessarily a formula that will ensure survival. Amazon is one of the biggest revenue producing companies in America but for almost two decades it has yet to return a meaningful profit to investors because it is constantly investing in its infrastructure.
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