Retail Reframed challenges conventional wisdom, refocuses the usual premise and asks unvarnished, thought-provoking questions about issues that drive opportunity.
I was on an ICSC + Women in CRE panel on real estate investment, when an idea crystallized for me. The best retail experts, investors and advisors share a single underrated skill: the ability to quantify the retail zeitgeist, the “spirit of the age” that captures what the consumer suddenly cares about and why. I had the same sense from the questions asked at the PREA Institute, cohosted by Berkeley Haas and the Fisher Center. The room was full of limited partners, the capital behind so many of the investors we work with every day. That LP set especially, just like retailers, needs to identify which operators are correctly reading the prevailing consumer mood of the moment.
Naming that mood is easy. We all see the same headlines. The craft is quantifying it, turning cultural signal into numbers an investment committee can underwrite. In a market with this little vacancy, it is the edge that will separate the operators who react from the ones who position ahead of the next shift.
No tidy formula can quantify the zeitgeist. But that skill, putting numbers to what the culture is telling us, is the thread running through many of our Retail Reframed editions. It is part instinct and part discipline. And it is what everything that follows is reaching for.
Laura Barr
The TikTok-to-Store Pipeline
For the generations that will define the next decade of spending, TikTok has become the front door to retail. CBRE's new UK Retail Generational Survey 2026 looked at 2,000 Gen Alpha, Gen Z and Millennial consumers. It found TikTok is the most important channel for brand discovery, named in the top three by nearly half of respondents and 63% of Younger Gen Z. Of all the respondents, more than half have bought on an influencer's recommendation, a number that rises to 67% among Younger Gen Z.
The surprise is not that discovery went social, but where the discovery leads. In-store is still the preferred way to buy, strongest among the youngest shoppers, with Younger Gen Z leading at 68%. The customer journey is TikTok to store, not TikTok to checkout. The screen creates the want; the store closes it.
So, the store becomes the conversion point for discovery that begins on a phone. Stores have to be social-media-ready, designed to be filmed and shared, as one in seven shoppers now visit specifically to create content. To keep pace, leasing has to move at the speed of a trend cycle. While lease lengths have held stable, the market has grown more comfortable with break clauses. Pop-ups matter more too, giving influencer-led and direct-to-consumer brands a low-commitment way to test physical space.
What happens as the channel changes again? CBRE’s survey shows that, for Gen Z, AI is now roughly level with traditional advertising. That shift is playing out in the market as shoppers begin asking AI what to buy. Yet even as the channel keeps changing, the destination may not. The real question is whether the store stays the place where discovery becomes decision, no matter which screen sends the shopper there.
The Footprint of the Resale Economy
Department stores are losing ground, and not only to the off-price chains that have pressured them for years. A recent Bank of America analysis finds they are now ceding share to secondhand apparel too.
Gen Z treats thrift and vintage as the default rather than the fallback, and, ThredUp reports, younger shoppers are set to drive most of the market's growth. At the other end of the secondhand spectrum is luxury resale. Authentication and consignment at players like The RealReal and Vestiaire Collective support real storefront economics, because buyers want to inspect a high-value preowned item before they commit. The winners in the value economy need square footage in a way pure e-commerce never did.
The most overlooked shift is inside stores that already exist. Branded resale programs grew 300% between 2021 and 2025, with Arc'teryx, New Balance, Dr. Martens and Lululemon building take-back and resale into their retail operations. ThredUp finds that 32% of secondhand buyers now purchase straight from a brand. As that channel grows, apparel retailers may seek larger stores to hold both new and preowned inventory. No resale floor will replace a departed anchor, but for landlords staring at mammoth vacant boxes, resale is a real consideration to backfill the space.
Then there is rental apparel. Services like Nuuly and Rent the Runway circulate clothes without a purchase ever happening, a distinct model within the value economy. But resale and rental share an operational reality conventional retail does not: Every item must be received, cleaned, authenticated and quality-checked one at a time. Which raises another question: Will the next surge in back-of-house and industrial demand come not from e-commerce but from the clothes we have already bought?
Retail's New Role in the Capital Stack
In South LA's Baldwin Hills, construction is underway at the first development in the United States to build housing atop a Costco. When it opens in 2027, 800 apartments will sit above a ground-floor store, with 184 units reserved for low-income households. The project is privately funded. Instead of tax credits or public subsidies, it got density: greater floor area and unit count than zoning otherwise would have allowed, all because affordable housing was part of the program.
Dense infill markets are notoriously hard for large-format retailers to break into. Land is scarce, zoning is restrictive, and community opposition runs high. But cities desperate for housing will approve projects they would never greenlight for retail alone. A necessity-retail anchor willing to commit to a ground-floor lease hands a developer the creditworthy tenant that makes the project pencil. In return the retailer gets a permit path, an accelerated timeline and a foothold in a market that had been effectively closed to it. And the retailer typically does not carry the entitlement or development risk.
The model is more replicable than a one-off story suggests. Kimco's Witmer in Arlington, Virginia, placed 440 apartments over a retail complex that includes a Costco and leased up the units within months of opening. As affordable housing gets harder to finance and cities open commercial land for residential use, the necessity-retail anchor is becoming one of the most powerful tools in mixed-use development. It reframes what looks like a leasing decision into something closer to a regulatory strategy. Retailers get the approvals. Developers get the financing. Cities get the housing. We spent a decade asking how retail survives. Now we are asking how to make housing affordable. Could this template be an answer for both?
The Price of a Retail Visit
Every store visit has a mode. A McKinsey and ICSC analysis frames it this way: Is the store serving a convenience trip, a discovery trip or a fulfillment function? Is it about convenience, experience or value? A customer downtown on a lunch break needs something different from one stocking up for the week, and the store that tries to serve both equally often wins neither. E-commerce and a-commerce (agentic commerce) raise the stakes. As online options take over for the routine trips, physical stores are left to compete for the deliberate ones. And they’re stepping up their game.
Target, Walmart and Dollar General are expected to spend at least $20 billion remodeling more than 12,000 locations this decade. Nearly half of that investment comes from Walmart alone. The spend maps to mission. New lighting, displays and expanded grocery serve discovery. Rebuilt back rooms and dedicated pickup zones serve fulfillment. Everyday-low pricing anchors convenience.
As retail banking has gone digital, Capital One has spent a decade turning its branches into café-style gathering places. It isn’t alone. Brands like Coach and Uniqlo are banking on the belief that physical space earns loyalty no screen can match. All that capital is not a bet on stores in general. It is a bet on stores with a defined mission.
Two forces have come into play. A 2025 federal tax change lets retailers expense these improvements immediately rather than over years, which changes the cashflow calculus. And building new is hard. Prime land is scarce. Construction and capital are expensive. Building is near record lows, and opening stores is tougher than it has been in years. So retailers are redeveloping what they already own, the fastest way to meet demand while the supply picture settles.
The 30-Minute Real Estate War
Retail and industrial are converging. We flagged it in our last edition when we argued last-touch logistics had become as much a brand strategy as a supply-chain issue. Amazon has made the convergence concrete. Its 30-minute service, Amazon Now, is expanding to dozens more U.S. cities. It aims to reach tens of millions of customers by year-end by placing small fulfillment sites close to where people live.
Ship-from-store and buy-online-pickup-in-store have become primary tactics for retailers competing on fulfillment speed. The next accelerant: AI-driven shopping agents, sometimes called a-commerce. They compare prices, features and delivery times, then complete the purchase without the shopper ever clicking a link. When an agent makes the call, delivery speed becomes the deciding variable, and the pull toward proximity fulfillment only grows.
The speed war is a real estate war in disguise. Thirty-minute delivery is more than a logistics trick. It is a land grab for small, infill space in dense neighborhoods, the same central locations retailers have always wanted. Every promise to deliver faster pulls demand toward a new micro-fulfillment footprint and away from the sprawling, remote warehouse.
The store spent years learning to double as a warehouse. The warehouse is now competing with the storefront, and that revalues every downtown address in its path.
Read On
Recent readings with insights on and beyond commercial real estate
At the CBRE Institute kickoff this year, Jamie Hodari posed a paradox: If software is eating the world, why does physical space keep growing in both size and value? For retail, the number that lands hardest is this: $1 billion in online sales needs roughly 3 times more space than the same sales through stores, a 450,000 sq. ft. store versus 1.2 million sq. ft. of logistics. Digital doesn't erase the footprint. It relocates and multiplies it. See Laura Barr's full LinkedIn post for the rest of the stats.
A new McKinsey and ICSC report argues AI is making shopping trips more deliberate, sorting them into two modes: convenience or discovery. As AI quietly absorbs the routine, autopilot purchases, the physical store is left to win the other kind of trip. The report's answer for landlords is to stop running centers as places to buy things and start running them as curated, experience-driven destinations. Convenience is going to the algorithm. Discovery is still up for grabs.
A wave of "dopamine sites" lets users run the whole online shopping ritual, browsing, reviewing, filling a cart, even tracking a courier, except nothing ships and no money changes hands. That should sound familiar to anyone betting the store's future on experience over transaction, a point Laura Barr explored in a recent LinkedIn post.
On the latest NRN's Extra Serving podcast, the hosts unpack why restaurants cut roughly 33,000 jobs in June, the first full month of summer, when hiring usually runs the other way. It's a telling signal for an industry still working to reverse softening sales and traffic in 2026. For retail real estate, the read on consumer spending is hard to ignore.
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