Shop the blues away

Well, I’d still bestow this dubious honour on November (and maybe even throw in the end of October). Why? You only need to look out of the window for the answer. After a few weeks of being spoilt by an Indian Summer, we have been dragged back into a much greyer reality – as the days shorten, our golden autumn has been turned into one filled with gales and driving rain. How are we supposed to get through all this dreariness? It’s a well-known fact that the best antidote for the late autumn blues is... shopping! Recently I was faced with a three-horned dilemma: Whether to sit in front of my computer. Or lie on the couch with my phone in one hand and a glass of mulled wine in the other. Or to banish the early evening gloom from my mind by popping into the local shopping centre, filled, as it is, with light and bright colours. What did I choose? At this point I remember a situation when a colleague was asked at a particular ceremony: what are you drinking, white or red wine? The answer was: both! Things have gone much the same way with purchases. Today, both channels (the physically tangible one in the form of brick-and-mortar stores in shopping centres, and the virtual, online version) have been getting more intimate with each other as consumers opt not to limit themselves to just one of them. How are shopping centre owners responding to this? We reveal this in our special retail supplement to the magazine, ‘The Digital Sell’. Liad Barzilai and Scott Dwyer of Atrium Group also give us some insights into their strategy for attracting and retaining shopping centre customers, in the feature article ‘Enter the Rationalists’. It might be worth reading, between one click and another...