Oh boy, did any retail format ever get the buzz that home shopping did when it first came along in the 1980s? Imagine being able to actually buy things that were being shown on your TV, not just watching dead-end commercials. It was interactive before interactive was even a thing. Now, nearly 50 years later, TV shopping is no longer a thing and with the news that QVC has missed its financial filing deadline yet again and will most likely end up in chapter 11, it may not be around…as we know it. What happened? Was it a failure to evolve the model to transition fast enough? First to ecommerce, and then more recently to social media and conversational commerce? Was it an antiquated merchandising mix that didn’t appeal to anyone who wasn’t hooked up to oxygen? Or maybe it was a tired and irrelevant visual presence that certainly didn’t work for next gen customers. How about all of the above? TV home shopping, led by QVC and its now-sister-brand HSN, were the hottest thing in retail…until it wasn’t.