Most industry reports age badly. This one aged into something more useful: a scorecard.
In 2021, PwC and The Consumer Goods Forum interviewed sixteen chief executives. Between them they ran Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Alibaba, Mondelez, Reckitt, A.S. Watson, SPAR, Grupo Bimbo, Migros Ticaret, IGA, and a dozen other names you would recognise from a shelf or a mall directory. The pandemic had just rewritten retail. The question they were asked was simple. What comes next?
Five years on, we can see which answers held. Here is what the report found, and what it means if you sell something expensive across a counter.
The store of the future opened early, and it turned out not to be a place
The headline finding was that the much-anticipated store of the future arrived ahead of schedule, and it did not have four walls. Behaviours that had been drifting toward adoption for years landed in weeks. Buy online and collect kerbside. Contact-free payment. Grocery on an app.
PwC’s June 2021 consumer survey found that 51% of consumers said they had become more digital in the space of about five months. Nearly half of retailers in PwC’s CEO survey said the biggest shift in customer behaviour was straightforward demand for online shopping. Mobile did the heavy lifting; the number of consumers shopping daily or weekly on a phone had grown by 325% since PwC’s 2016 survey.
And yet the report refused to write off the physical store. Malina Ngai of A.S. Watson Group put it more bluntly than any consultant would have: “Retail is not dead! It just needs to be better.” Brick and mortar was still where most sales happened. What the executives were arguing about was not whether stores survive, but what a store is for.
That question is the one still open in 2026.
What actually pulls someone through the door
The report gave a clear answer, and it has held up well.
When PwC asked consumers why they still shop in person, the top two reasons were the ability to see and touch the product (45%) and the ability to find what they want quickly (39%). Everything else came lower.
Read that again if you sell jewellery, eyewear, watches, or a car. Both of those reasons are physical. Neither can be replicated by an app. And both are delivered, or destroyed, by a person standing at a counter.
The report’s framing was that stores would become hubs for experimentation, education, and information. John Ross of IGA described his network as a place where somewhere, someone is always trying something interesting. In grocery, that means a chef instead of a bakery. In premium retail, it means something harder and more expensive: a salesperson who can explain a certification, read hesitation, and handle a price objection without discounting.
Trust is the asset, and it gets spent at the counter
The most quietly important section of the report was on brand relevance.
Asked what keeps them loyal, consumers ranked reliability first at 46%; the brand doing what it said it would do. Wide availability came next at 31%. Exceptional customer service and loyalty programmes tied at 26%. Ethical practices followed at 24%. Separately, PwC found that 70% of US respondents treated trust as the single most important factor when choosing a brand.
Salman Amin of pladis described the work as building a bank of trust, deposited over years and withdrawn in a moment. Alain Bejjani of Majid Al Futtaim made the sharper point: in a fast-changing economy, words stop counting and only action registers.
Here is the part that matters. The report named two routes for converting trust into brand equity. One was influencers. The other was frontline employees.
Then it dropped a finding that most of the industry read past: in its work with retailers, PwC found a strong correlation between how seriously a retailer treats employee experience and how profitable its stores are.
Not a soft correlation with engagement. With profitability.
Transparency and sustainability moved from marketing into operations
The other three trends in the report were sustainability in food, supply chain resilience, and ESG. Each has since become table stakes rather than differentiation.
The consumer signal was strong. More than half of respondents (55%) said transparency and traceability shaped their buying. In grocery, 48% said they would pay more for local sourcing and 53% for a healthier option. Daniel Zhang of Alibaba framed transparency as the fastest way to remove doubt from a purchase.
For premium retail, the lesson translates directly. Provenance sells. Lab-grown versus mined. Ethical sourcing. Certification. Warranty terms. All of it is a trust argument, and all of it has to be made out loud, by a human, in the two minutes after a customer picks something up. If your staff cannot make that argument, the transparency investment behind it never reaches the buyer.
The supply chain and ESG sections carried the same shape. Real-time visibility. Traceability by design. Purpose that survives contact with a P&L. David Taylor of Procter & Gamble asked what would happen if you infused a global corporation with the speed and curiosity of a start-up.
The gap the report identified and nobody closed
Strip the report down and it makes one argument. Digital took over discovery. The physical store survived because touch and human judgment cannot be downloaded. Trust decides the purchase. And frontline employees are where trust either converts or leaks.
Then look at where the last five years of retail spending actually went. Omnichannel platforms. CRM. Clienteling apps. Loyalty stacks. Endless aisle. Store analytics that count footfall, dwell time, and conversion.
All of it measures the customer. Almost none of it measures the conversation.
Which is strange, because in premium retail the conversation is the transaction. A jewellery counter interaction can run forty minutes. An eyewear consultation involves prescription, lifestyle, and price sensitivity in one thread. A car sale is three visits and four objections. Your best performer routinely outsells your average performer by a wide margin, in the same store, on the same footfall, with the same inventory. Every retail leader knows this. Very few can tell you why, in specifics, in language a trainer could act on.
PwC’s report told the industry in 2021 that store profitability tracks frontline capability. The industry agreed, funded everything except that, and moved on.
That gap is the opportunity now. The store of the future was never going to be a screen. It was always going to be a person, better equipped.
Source: “What’s next: How consumer goods leaders envision tomorrow,” PwC and The Consumer Goods Forum, 2021. All survey figures are from PwC’s June 2021 Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey unless noted. Executive titles reflect roles at the time of publication.