Welcome to Point of Sale

When the Star Tribune first asked me to cover retail a couple of months ago, I didn't exactly do cartwheels. (I don't think I can actually do a cartwheel but you get the point.)

Over the past 18 months, I had worked at two technology blogs, where I wrote about medical devices, wind power, software, pharmaceuticals, a stark contrast to the seemingly staid bricks and mortars world of the retail industry.

Then it suddenly occurred to me.

Retail isn't bricks and mortars anymore. Retail IS high technology. Retail IS innovation.

In the earlier half of this decade, I was the retail reporter in St. Louis where I wrote about May Department Stores and Brown Shoe, two sleepy, old school retailers struggling to modernize themselves.

But in Target and Best Buy, we have two retailers that already enjoy reputations for vibrancy and relevance precisely because they embrace innovation and technology.

Target recently relaunched its website, the first step in what the company says will be a big push into digital media, including mobile devices. Best Buy, already considered a leader in multi-channel retailing, is hiring 250 IT specialists over the next year to support its digital ambitions.

Gone are the days when the store was the store and the Internet was the Internet. Today, the store is the Internet and the Internet is the store.

Throw in social media, tablets, and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and we have the makings of a full blown high-tech revolution on our hands. Retail today is not just about selling stuff to consumers in a store. It's about engaging, entertaining, and informing consumers 24/7 no matter where there are or what device they happen to be clutching.

And just to make things extra interesting, retailers are operating in a economy that's still struggling to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression. When consumer spending drives two-thirds of the nation's economy, retailers have cause to sweat.

So we live in a period of profound flux, driven by blink-and-you'll-miss-it innovation and economic volatility.