We are advocates of foresight (the strategic capacity to anticipate future shifts, risks, and opportunities, involving a combination of scanning, scenario planning, and visioning) as a powerful tool to anticipate the future. The industry faces an Everything, Everywhere, All at Once environment of disruption; resilience may keep some brands standing. But to thrive and grow stronger, antifragility may be the better choice to survive during periods of sustained tumult.
The concept of antifragility is nuanced. Antifragility isn’t simply being tough or even indestructible; it is a shape-shifting quality that adapts and transforms when subjected to pressure. In the words of author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same, the anti-fragile gets better.”
Will retail employment crater in 2028? And the answer is: Foresight offers four scenarios; which is yours?
Oxymoronic Results
Despite the impacts of tariffs and their surrounding drama, retail sales continue to increase year over year, as noted in recent reports. The U.S./Israel campaign against Iran may have a greater impact on consumer activity if fuel prices remain elevated, but to date, the American consumer marches on.
Retail dwells comfortably in short-termism, thinking in quarters and seasons, hoping to inch slightly ahead of the previous benchmark. A stock market kerfuffle that erupted on February 24, following a weekend memo dropped by Citrini Research, a small financial research firm, oddly left consumer stocks undisturbed. Yet, overall market sentiment soured; the Dow closed down 8 percent, although consumer equities were up 1.3 percent that day. The memo caught on like wildfire and presents a bleak fictional narrative, retracing steps from a speculative agentic-dominated economy in 2028 (with extraordinarily high unemployment) backward to today. An excerpt: “Two years. That’s all it took to get from ‘contained’ and ‘sector-specific’ to an economy that no longer resembles the one any of us grew up in.” Continuing, “AI capabilities improved, companies needed fewer workers, white collar layoffs increased, displaced workers spent less, margin pressure pushed firms to invest more in AI, and AI capabilities improved. It was a negative feedback loop with no natural brake.”
Although the internet, social media, and pundits blew up virally with reactions to the report, the retail industry simply shrugged. After all, retail has survived recessions, pandemics, booms, busts, wars, and a depression; the enduring belief is that we can always count on the American consumer.
New Complexity
An agentic AI future presents a complex situation with neither an established road map nor guardrails. The efficiency and efficacy of AI agents replacing employees will be impossible to resist, despite negative effects on the consumer job market. We should anticipate long-term or possibly permanent job losses across sectors that will, in turn, impact discretionary spending. The Citrini Research cranked the dramatic effect of this crisis to the extreme (and it may have created a market opportunity for its authors). We are more measured and look at it as a provocative and useful speculative exercise in shaking off short-term thinking.
Inspired by Citrini, we created our own series of speculative scenarios describing a range of outcomes for a 2028 consumer and retail economy operating with integrated cognitive systems (AI). We based the scenarios on our assumption that a serious economic shock sits firmly within the zone of plausibility. Should an employment collapse materialize, the organizations that will thrive in the 2030s are those that lean into the new economic reality, rather than those waiting for a return to normal that will never materialize.
We based our scenarios on two uncertainties. First, will the job losses be either temporary or permanent (we acknowledge that temporary is a relative term, and permanent is not, but there is no absolute antonym to permanent), and whether the unemployment trajectory is rapid or gradual. We built a 2×2 matrix comparing the scenarios.
We don’t claim to have the superpowers to predict which, if any, of these outcomes will materialize, but we do believe in strategic foresight; we are not fans of waiting for the future to arrive to plan for it. The point isn’t doomsaying; it is strategically examining plausible outcomes to disruption and change while searching for resultant opportunities and limiting risk. We respectfully disagree with disruption skeptics such as WSJ Chief Economics Commentator Greg Ip, who apply today’s data to future projections, saying, “If such a (an employment) revolution were upon us, we should see some sign of it. We don’t, at least not yet.” There is no future data, but there are signals of change to which we should listen and consider.
In the scenarios, the axes examine the duration of employment loss with the pace of firings. Two scenarios are labeled temporary, meaning that employment rates will rebound to similar levels at some point in the future.
- The Plateau zooms out, observing an overview of economic change that is neither dramatic nor shocking…until it is.
With its short-term perspective, The Continuation, is the most likely scenario. This fictional glimpse inside the boardroom of an ecommerce retailer presents misguided executives who choose to disregard and downplay the impact of a signal, assuming the future will resemble the past.
- The Intermission demonstrates the entrepreneurial spirit and resilience of a small business owner; dig in, adapt, and survive the crisis.
- The Reordering, takes the perspective of the consumer class in which the shock is swift, severe, and most resembles the dire events the Citrini memo illustrates. But the dystopian Citrini memo concludes with an unhelpful note to think about this before it is too late, rather than offering any mitigations, interventions, or suggestions.
A Historic Framework
The fictional scenarios we present result in job displacement that is not cyclical; it is structural and ricochets through the entire retail industry. Arguably, the last catastrophic economic collapse that resulted in such massive job losses was the Great Depression. In 1929, Sears was a retailer that proved to be anti-fragile, thanks to a sound balance sheet. It grew as it capitalized on the opportunity of low property and labor costs, nearly doubling its retail locations by 1930, shifting from primarily a mail-order business to destination brick and mortar Levi’s is a brand that, unlike Sears, survived. Denim workwear wasn’t discretionary for many during the Depression; it was functional and durable. Looking back, Levi’s was not anti-fragile; it was resilient. The company survived because their product aligned with the dominant consumer value imposed on the era: Buy less, buy better, buy what lasts.
Surviving a Deacquisition Environment
The Depression is an extreme example, but it can be instructive to look at the dark side rather than reflexively looking away. The military has long applied game theory and war games to its strategy. The Shell scenarios helped the oil company prepare for the 1970s oil shock and still apply the practice in strategic development. In our scenarios, no individual, company, or society was prepared to address the crisis, but one scenario demonstrated a path forward.
The Reordering offers a pragmatic model to adapt to disruption, including:
- Right-to-repair. Forced deacquisition doesn’t mean zero spending; it means less and different spending. Products that extend the life of existing possessions, repair services, parts, maintenance, and upgrades, rather than replacement purchasing patterns, could expand in a sustained deacquisition environment. Retailers who can reposition around product longevity rather than product replacement will serve a growing need.
- If BNPL and consumer credit shrink alongside discretionary spending, a consumer base that emerges from a prolonged deacquisition period may have lower debt obligations. This could offer a retail opportunity on the other side of the crisis.
- Social and shared consumption models may emerge as adaptive solutions to consumer needs. Community spaces, tool lending, maker spaces, neighborhood exchange networks, and shared subscription models may take off in a deacquisition environment. This could represent an innovation opportunity for a retailer who builds the infrastructure of shared consumption.
Bellwethers
On March 4, Apple introduced the $599.00 MacBook Neo. The Neo is not a dumbed-down facsimile of a Mac; it is an Apple computer, stripped of the extras, designed to serve most consumer computing needs: communication, viewing content, email, text, and word and data processing. This laptop has a price equivalent to the iPhone 17e, the least expensive iPhone in the 2026 collection. Apple is disrupting its premium pricing model by developing its own high-quality, low-cost alternative. Additionally, the Neo has been called the most repairable computer of all time. What future is Apple planning for?
Walmart blends foresight into strategy. It embraces experimentation, learns from mistakes, and braces for impact. We can add Walmart to our list of retailers that grew stronger under adversity when we consider how the company shape-shifted, transforming its physical store network into distribution centers for ecommerce during Covid. Watch Walmart.
Antifragility
No scenario can truly capture the full weight of structural unemployment and its impacts on a consumer economy should it occur, but the future is likely to reward preparation. What retailers can do now is examine a range of contingencies. Imagine the consumers of 2028. How might you serve them? The retailers who will define the next two decades are not those with the most accurate forecasts; they will be those who plan for disruption with foresight, strategize to grow despite it, and prepare to emerge stronger.
