🎭 The commerce industry has a flair for the dramatic headline.
By Lauren Livak Gilbert · July 7, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
🎭 The commerce industry has a flair for the dramatic headline.
Let's dive into the archives to demonstrate exactly what I mean...
Remember 2017? "The Retail Apocalypse is here." The Atlantic called it "The Great Retail Apocalypse of 2017." Credit Suisse predicted 25% of US malls would close by 2022. Newsweek declared the indoor mall format would be obsolete in 2008. Deadmalls.com built an entire website cataloguing nearly 450 dead or dying malls.
Then 2020 hit and everyone said: well, now they're really dead.
Except in Q1 2024, indoor mall foot traffic was up 9.7% year over year. Open-air centers surpassed their 2019 visitor levels for the first time since COVID. Mall vacancy rates hit their lowest point in two decades. The malls didn't die. They got a Ferris wheel and a Texas Roadhouse and called it a comeback.
Then eCommerce was going to replace all in-store shopping.
A 2017 conference presentation went semi-viral predicting that by 2024, ecommerce would overtake physical retail entirely: the two lines crossing at $600M each. Didn't happen. Physical retail still accounts for 84% of purchases.
Now the new narrative is agentic commerce. AI agents will shop for you. McKinsey says $3-5 trillion in global commerce will flow through AI agents by 2030.
The hype cycle in commerce follows a very reliable pattern: one channel is declared dead, another is declared the only future, everyone panics, and then... consumers keep doing a mix of everything, like they always have.
The mall isn't dead. Ecommerce didn't win. And AI agents buying your groceries while you sleep isn't mainstream yet.
While it is obvious to all of us that things have changed, people still shop in-store, online and use LLMs to discovery products.
So let's all take a breath! 😮💨