For those of you who read the financial pages, you may have noticed a slew of articles being written as of late regarding the serious travails of brick and mortar retail stores against the onslaught of Amazon and other online retailers. Small mom and pop retail outlets are closing everywhere, Target closed all of its stores in Canada, JC Penney is not doing well, Macy's has lost half of its market value in under two years, Sears is probably going bankrupt and even the venerable investor Warren Buffet has sold most of his shares of Walmart saying "the online thing is hard to figure out, you know?"
For background, really informative podcast on the retail environment, which among other things we find that the interviewer spends FIFTEEN hours a week food shopping in traditional stores:
http://blog.estimize.com/post/158932224737/a-tale-of-two-retailers-which-stores-will-shutter
and the IBD "Death Stalks Retail Stocks"
http://www.investors.com/news/retail-stores-still-have-hope-but-what-about-retail-stocks/
This matters to us as producers and purveyors of food because Amazon has declared that groceries are the final frontier for its enterprise. Very big deal here people.
I'm not an expert on retail by any means, so will not elaborate on this theme other than to point out that who ever figures out how to ship high quality berries direct to the consumer is going to do very, very well.