Retail Forecasting

Retail Forecasting

Retail forecasting is the business of predicting how shopping will change. Checked against official statistics, the forecasts of the last decade were mostly right about direction and wrong about speed: always too fast and too far.

What it is

This publication calibrated the forecasts in Jörg Snoeck and Pauline Neerman's The Future of Shopping (second edition, 2022) against the US Census Bureau's online-share series. Online share did rise, shops did close, and the pandemic did leave a lasting increase. But the 2020 jump largely reversed, and the share took until 2025 to regain its spring 2020 level. Twelve of the book's fifty-two forecasts carried no date, which makes them impossible to check.

In effect

Three questions sort a useful forecast from rhetoric. What does the official series show? Is the claim about a level or a spike? Does it have a date?

What it does not say

It does not say forecasting is worthless. The direction of change was usually right, and that has value for planning.

It does not say any particular forecaster was careless. Dramatic forecasts attract more attention than modest ones, which rewards the wrong kind of prediction.

Sources

  1. Snoeck, J., & Neerman, P. (2022). The Future of Shopping: Where Everyone Is a Retailer, second edition. Lannoo.
  2. US Census Bureau, Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales, 2026.